MarketStar Blog | Customer Success (3)

Key Takeaways

• Brands must implement a seamless buying experience to make their customers come back, even during an economic crisis

• Repeat purchases are the ideal way to keep your business healthy and running during an economic downturn 

• Customers who are happy with your product/services tend to refer their friends to your brand

• Retaining your existing customers will help you grow your business amidst the challenges other companies are experiencing

Economic downturns or recessions can significantly impact customer behavior and your organization's approach to retaining customers.

As a CS leader, you must keep your team productive, motivated, and efficient during challenging economic times to retain your customers.

Customer success has never been more vital than it is right now, but instead of concentrating on KPIs and analytics, it’s crucial to pay attention to the customer.

By focusing on customer outcomes, an organization's current goal should be to make their customers’ lives easier while they use the product or service. Hopefully, the customer will benefit from this and continue doing business with you through challenging times.

This article will discuss why customer retention should become your number one focus and how to retain customers in an economic downturn.

The 5 Effective Strategies for Fostering a Loyal Customer Base

Even when things are going well with the global economy, retaining customers is difficult and building a loyal customer base is an ongoing effort. Making client retention marketing a priority requires hard work, even in the best times. 

However, when a recession occurs, things become even more difficult. 

People make fewer purchases, spend less, and forget some of their preferred brands to conserve money. You might think, “How can I hope to retain my customers in the current climate?” 

Fortunately, many strategies are still available to help create a solid consumer base, even during a downturn. A few of them are presented below. 

1. Put Customer Experience First

According to PWC, only 49% of consumers believe that businesses offer good customer service options, while 73% think customer service experience pre-purchase is a crucial determinant of their purchase decision. 

This indicates that you can quickly establish a loyal customer base if you can set yourself apart from your rivals in terms of customer service. 

Providing a positive and personalized customer experience, especially during a recession, is everything when it comes to running a successful business. 

You must ensure that you provide quality products and services, deliver them on time, and respond quickly to customer inquiries and complaints. By doing so, you will be able to keep your customers happy and coming back for more.  

To ensure that you are providing the best possible customer experience, it is essential to strive for improvement constantly. This means continually evaluating your procedures and removing inefficiencies where necessary. And removing inefficiencies that are affecting the CSAT score, NPS, or LTV.  

It is also important to listen to your customers and consider their feedback. By doing all of this, you can be sure that you are providing the best possible customer experience and running a successful business.

2. Be Flexible 

Be flexible with your customers.  

If they can’t pay their bill on time, offer them a payment plan. If they’re unhappy with a purchase, offer them a refund or exchange. 

Being flexible with your customers shows that you’re willing to work with them to ensure they’re satisfied. This can help build long-term loyalty, and trust and boost sales from existing customers. 

Customers feel appreciated when companies are ready to look out for them in times of need. Offer discounts and incentives when possible. When people spend less money on goods and services, they start looking for ways to save money elsewhere. 

Offering discounts or incentives may result in increased sales at times when your company cannot afford to lose money from sales volume alone. 

3. Have a Community-Oriented Perspective

During times of global disruption, people seek a community to belong to and connect with.  

Start developing meaningful connections with your existing customers to strengthen the relationship. Once you build a customer community, it will continue working for your business, even when you are not trying hard.  

Building trusting relationships with your customers will cost you nothing, and the payoff is immeasurable. Make direct contact with your clients and express gratitude, making them feel they are being seen and heard.   

Creating a community around your company, however, can be tricky.  

You can use community-building platforms and social media to build the community and offer loyalty programs or referral discounts to grow your business. 

4. Be Compassionate

In the same way that individuals seek out the community during a turbulent time, they also seek a little compassion and recognition. This can be accomplished through personalization – personalizing your approach for each customer can make them feel valued. 

When done well, personalized customer service may increase retention, foster customer loyalty and trust, reduce churn rates, and support the maintenance of a solid client base. 

According to HubSpot, personalized CTAs outperform non-personalized CTAs by more than 200%, and most customers are more likely to continue with a business that provides a personalized experience. 

Valuing your clients is a successful business strategy, especially when they are concerned about their expenses. You do not want your customers to stop doing business with you because they feel you don’t care about them. 

5. Add Value to Your Product/Service

The easiest way to retain customers is by bringing value to your customers. Be proactive with the value propositions the business has to offer. 

You can add value to your business with a single offer, but adding value as part of a series is much more effective. Here are some examples: 

1) Add a bonus product or service at the same price point and let customers know about it. This can be a free report, video or guide, or even an additional product at the same price.

It helps create loyalty by giving customers something extra for free, showing that you’re willing to go above and beyond for them. 

2) Improve customer service by walking them through processes that may not have been explained well before (or at all!) so that people know what’s expected of them when using your product or service.  

This can be done in person or via email – just ensure that customers know what’s happening behind the scenes! 

3) You should also improve the quality and performance of your products/services to help retain loyal customers who may not expect much from you but appreciate quality when delivered consistently. 

To Summarize

Driving customer loyalty in a challenging economic climate is key to increasing your business growth, and convenience is the key to gaining trust and loyalty from your customers in these times.

The above-mentioned strategies can help you achieve what you want and unlock huge benefits during a recession.

Outsourcing certain functions, such as sales pipeline management or customer support, can also help your organization take better care of your customers and become a boon for cost-conscious companies.

Using outsourcing as an intelligent business strategy can improve retention and position the organization to meet the challenges imposed by a recession favorably. 

Key Insights

Customer support and expectations in 2022 will leave little room for error. 

Key Insights

Like all areas of business, telemarketing has undergone rapid changes in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Call volumes have increased, contact center managers are looking for better tools, and there is a renewed focus on increasing process efficiency. 

A study by the Harvard Business Review highlights how difficult calls saw a 50% uptick during the pandemic.

Key Insights

• Your customer onboarding strategy is probably the most important stage of the customer lifecycle 

• While it comes right at the start of their journey, with your offering, it sets the tone for their whole relationship with your product and company 

• The ultimate goal of any customer onboarding program is to get your customers to come back to your product

A 5% increase in customer retention can increase a company’s profit by 25%, according to a report by Bain & Company.

Why? Because loyal customers are more likely to repeat their purchases. 

Effective customer onboarding is one way to ensure this. 

User onboarding is so critically important because it sets the tone for the ongoing relationship your customer has with your product. A good customer onboarding process will: 

• Keep Your Customer Engaged: They will clearly understand and experience the value they’ll get from your product. More importantly, it will give them a reason to log back in and use your product again and again.

• Improve Trial Conversions: If you offer a free or discounted product trial, user onboarding is where your trial users get to experience the value of your product. A good user onboarding process— right at the start of their trial — will help them to convert into paid customers.

But how do we create the perfect customer onboarding experience? 

The article shares the top actionable practices and trends of customer onboarding for 2022. 

1. Simplify the Sign-up Process

The average landing page conversion rate stands at 2.35%. The top 10% of sites are looking at 11.45% and above.

The above onboarding statistics brings us to a common misconception– that customer onboarding doesn’t start until a customer has signed up for your product. 

While every company operates differently, if you see a higher-than-average drop-off rate, it suggests you’re asking for too much information too soon. 

Such an approach gives a negative brand review or recommendation. 

Ask yourself the following questions while working on your company’s sign-up page: 

• Does your page make it easier for customers to sign up?

• Are you collecting only the essential information to personalize users’ experiences?

• If the answer to these questions is a resounding yes, you’re on the right track! 

Don’t forget that you can always collect more information about the customers in the later stage

2. Send a Welcome Email

A welcome email expresses gratitude. It speaks volumes about how much you value your users.

It also sets expectations for the customer onboarding process.

A few tips that can help you craft a stellar welcome email are: 

• Ensure that your content is crisp, actionable, and easy to understand. 

• Consider including a call to action (CTA) along with the welcome email. 

• Share the email IDs of your support team so that your customers know who to reach out to in case of queries. 

• You can also make way for AI-powered writing tools and automate the entire process of sending welcome emails. 

3. Integration and Data Imports

If you are a B2B business, then your customer onboarding strategy is more than just helping your customers learn how to use your product.

Your product is now part of your customer’s technology stack. This means that they may need to set up integrations with other tools they use or even invite their team to get the most value from your product.

Automate as much as you can.

Set up an integration between your customer’s marketing automation platform and your product. This will help you remove sticking points that might stop the customer from getting value from your product. But ensure that such a practice is optional and not mandatory.

4. Product Walk-through

A well-thought customer onboarding plan consists of product walkthroughs for your customers. This helps them get set up and complete key tasks within your product. 

However, product walkthroughs can be done away with if your new customer is already familiar with your product. An unskippable walkthrough can be just as much a barrier for your clients. 

Remember that not everyone will want to go through a product walkthrough the first time they log in. Make it easy for your new customers to return to your product walkthrough later. 

For some users, such walkthroughs might not be enough to get them started. Make it easier for your customers to find extra support.

Building Better Rapport

It is easy to think that the main goal of your customer onboarding process is to help your customers start using your product. It is so much more than that. 

Your ultimate objective is to set your customers up for long-term success, where they become not just your repeat customers but also loyal brand advocates. 

Your metric for a successful customer onboarding program is whether your customers log back into your product in the days, weeks, and months after first use.

Key Takeaways

In the dynamic marketplace that we are in today, building long-lasting relationships with customers is the only way for organizations to ensure the success of their business goals

Key Insights

• In the past few years, the methods of delivering adtech solutions have dynamically transformed the industry

• This sudden surge has left marketers scrambling to capture the eyes of viewers whose attention is more divided than ever

• Adtech offers a way out with its countless opportunities

• As it continues its spread, ad tech companies will be able to develop more integrations, more data sharing, extended reach across all channels, and cleaner integrations against content

You run ads, and then your ads dominate the industry. All thanks to the brands that worked on it with laser-sharp focus.

However, there is an invisible force that is keeping the lights on–adtech.

Advertising technology has been around for a few years, but it only recently caught the attention of savvy ad tech agencies.

In the era of rapid digitization and big data, brands are recognizing the need of striking long-lasting relationships with ad tech companies to make themselves more powerful and attractive to clients.

The industry is already rife with fierce competition, operating at a breakneck pace.

In the age of social media, agencies are feeling the need to investigate innovative ways to interact with relevant users, rather than relying on typical broadcast or digital media buys.

The advantages for agencies investing in adtech are plentiful. According to the Global Ad Spend Forecasts 2021 by Dentsu, global advertising is forecast to recover upto 10.4% growth, reflecting a total spend of $634 billion.

So, while advertising's purpose has not changed much, its methods have evolved. 

How Do You Navigate this Landscape?

From aligning sales and support to providing effective onboarding, we bring you the top 5 factors to consider while selling adtech solutions in 2022 and beyond. 

1. Differentiate Yourself 

The competition in the adtech space is fierce because there are thousands of companies that compete for a vast, yet growing amount of money. From Google to a budding enterprise you haven’t heard of, the competition is undoubtedly high. 

To succeed, adtech companies must find their niche. This is how you can ensure your service remains in demand, no matter who or what is in control of the market. 

Start with a good idea that has not been capitalized on.

The future of adtech involves understanding industry trends and what the customer needs. Successful adtech solutions locate holes in the marketplace and work backwards from the needs of these customers to develop and deliver a solution.

Effective content can be your weapon of choice here. It is a proven scalable tool while being relatively inexpensive to promote and position your company in a potentially saturated market.

From leveraging different content formats to providing greater value, there are many ways for companies to position themselves.

2. Specialize Your Sales Team 

Many companies, especially in the software sector, have discovered the power of specializing in their sales functions to achieve new levels of growth.

While adtech companies aspire to be software, only a few have started thinking like software companies, especially when it comes to sales.

The guiding philosophy of specialization is that sellers should focus on closing rather than prospecting. Moreover, they should leverage a specialized “sales development” function to find qualified prospects that match their target criteria.

This specialized sales function should also move away from account management and growth, which then would be taken care of by teams specializing in the said skill.

3. Don’t Discredit Long Tail Sales

As you get more successful with your adtech solutions, it is tempting to focus on the big hitters. However, many of your competitors are also aiming for the enterprise level, making it a more competitive field. You face less competition when dealing with a small business. 

In the US, 28 million small businesses in America account for 54 percent of all sales in the country. Needless to say, the long tail in digital media accounts for a significant sum.

Advertising technology must be worked upon, keeping this in mind.

In today’s hyper-connected culture, many of these small enterprises are connected via bigger consortiums. Making connections with appropriate decision-makers is much easier. 

4. Build Your Own Tech Stack

As passionate as most adtech companies are about their prospects’ technology choices, many don’t apply the same concern for their own sales or marketing tech stacks. 

Some crucial elements such as sales automation, marketing automation, CRM, and a couple of key data sources are key to the success of your adtech solutions. 

CRM governance and hygiene are increasingly critical for garnering insights over long sales cycles and with increased cross-functional account involvement from specialization. 

5. Increase Your Investment

While we are in a better place than six to 12 months ago, the market remains uncertain.

A knee-jerk reaction for most companies in a recession is to cut marketing spend and cease all marketing activity. However, this can prove to be fatal for the growth of adtech solutions.

Marketing is no longer a ‘nice-to-have’ function. It is central to business operations and holds vital things like customer experience, user experience, and customer trust and loyalty.

Smart marketers, over the last two years, changed and increased their investment compared to their competitors. They were able to grab a larger voice, and consequently, they feel they can grow their market share. 

Wrapping Up

The adtech solutions space is getting more complex and competitive every year.

For adtech companies, the priority is quite clear: build everlasting relationships by providing a stellar customer experience.

With the right tools and mechanics in place, it is completely possible for adtech companies to set themselves up for success, even in the saturated digital media space. 

A Customer Success program is an essential part of modern business, especially for technology solutions that are challenging to adopt in new environments. But customer success programs can also be a challenge to implement internally, especially if your organization doesn't have the infrastructure, expertise, or resources to handle it. In these situations, outsourcing CS can take those responsibilities off your plate. This allows you to give Customer Success programs the attention they deserve while you can focus on the unique value that your company is known for.

As business solutions grow increasingly complex, some buyers require additional assistance to introduce and implement new products or services into their company’s environment  successfully. It’s no longer enough for business-to-business (B2B) sales organizations to sell a product or service and leave the customer to their own devices. Today, they need support and knowledge over the long haul. 

Key Takeaways

• If there is one SaaS metric you should monitor carefully, then it is your churn rate. The lower the percentage, the better

• However, the churn rate does not give you the full picture and health of your business

• To understand the impact of churn on your revenue, Net Retention Rate (NRR) and Gross Retention Rate (GRR) are more effective markers

• Choosing between the two metrics can be tricky as the metric you employ can help determine the health of your business

Almost every profitable enterprise relies on its customer base to succeed.

Customer success is, even more, a critical consideration for businesses that provide solutions through a SaaS model.

Customer success is an important component of every department: marketing, sales, onboarding, support, hiring, or operations. The goal is to deliver value to the customers.

Therefore, the question that arises is: How do you measure it?

Few critical metrics for customer success provide valuable insights into the many factors that determine your customer’s success. These metrics help businesses understand and explain how and why a customer uses their solution, how many customers they are retaining, and the value of both retained customers and those lost to attrition.

For many organizations, the answer to these questions lies in using several methods or metrics. At the same time, these metrics are not static and can keep changing through the customer life cycle.

Why are Customer Success Metrics So Critical? 

The metrics for customer success come into the picture because of customer churn. And less than ideal customer service is one of the most dominant reasons why customer churn occurs. 

According to one study, 65% of customers have switched to a different brand because of poor customer experience. So even if you have the most competitive product in the industry, a mediocre experience will lead you to lose customers.

A crucial reason for reducing your churn rate is the reality of just focusing on new customer acquisitions. 

While the success rate of selling to a new customer stands at a mere 5-20%, your success rate of selling to an existing customer is 60-70%! This is because your current customers are already happy using your product or service. They trust your business, which is so important if businesses want to remain relevant in the current competitive landscape.

New customers, on the other hand, need to be convinced why they should spend money on your product.

Existing customers will be the key to your business success.

Consequently, you can significantly reduce churn if you know what your current customer base is experiencing and what you can do to alleviate some of their pain points.

The 2 Key Metrics to Measure the Efficacy of Your Customer Success Program: NRR & GRR

Broadly speaking, there are two metrics that can help you measure the amount of revenue you have retained or revenue that you did not lose to churn.

These customer success metrics are – Net Retention Rate (NRR) and Gross Retention Rate (GRR).

What is the Net Retention Rate in SaaS?

Net Retention Rate is a SaaS-based metric that helps businesses calculate the percentage of revenue they have retained from existing customers over a period.

This can be monthly or yearly and can include upgrades, downgrades, cross-sells, and cancellations.

In simple terms, your NRR helps you understand how many of your existing customers are staying loyal and extending their subscriptions.

NRR, also known as Net Dollar Retention, helps you understand whether the service you are providing has the quality of engaging new customers and meeting their needs. It’s a key metric that can help uphold a company’s financial performance and comes in handy when evaluating the quality of customer success.

Calculating Net Retention Rate

You first add your Churn MRR and Expansion MRR and subtract them from Contraction MRR. 

Further, subtract the result from starting MRR. Now, divide the result by starting MRR and then go on to multiply it by 100 to get your Net Retention Rate.

NRR = (Starting MRR – Contraction MRR – Churn MRR + Expansion MRR)/ Starting MRR x 100

Here’s what this means:

• MRR: Monthly Recurring Revenue or the amount of recurring revenue a company predicts to earn each month

• New MRR: Monthly Recurring Revenue from new customers

• Contraction MRR: These are your downgrades or lost MRR from existing customers

• Churned MRR – These are your lost MRR from canceled customers

• Expansion MRR- These are your upgrades or MRR from existing customers

Improving Net Retention Rate

To begin with, you can encourage your users to upgrade their trial accounts to paid accounts using modals.

A modal is a rectangular UI element that is commonly used in SaaS businesses to notify users of something important.

Modals are effective as they grab the customer’s attention as they normally take up most of the user interface. Contextual in-app messaging is another great way to help increase your NRR.

What is the Gross Retention Rate in SaaS?

Your Gross Retention Rate is the ability of your business to retain its existing customers.

When you retain your customers, you retain revenue. So, GRR is the percentage of customers a business can retain at the existing price point.

Unlike NRR, your GRR does not take into account revenue earned from expansion, upsells, and cross-sells. But it does include any downgrades or cancellations of subscriptions. Your Gross Retention Rate simply tells you how happy your existing customers are. It is a stability indicator of any SaaS-based business model.

Calculating Gross Retention Rate

GRR is the rate of existing customers retained during a given period.

To calculate GRR, subtract your MRR at the beginning of the period from your downgraded MRR during the period. 

Further, subtract your downgraded MRR with your contraction MRR. Now, divide the result by the MRR at the beginning of the period. GRR = (MRR start – Churn – Contraction) / MRR

Improving Gross Retention Rate

An excellent method to boost your GRR is by giving your customers the opportunity to speak out about their concerns.

This can be done through surveys which will enable you to determine customer experience. The onboarding process plays a critical role here, ensure you have a solid onboarding process in place to retain more customers, and consequently revenue.

What Should You Focus On – NRR or GRR?

The debate over whether to pick NRR or GRR is tricky. 

Net Retention Rate might look like a better alternative as it considers two revenue streams: upsells and renewals. 

However, the Gross Retention Rate has a small advantage over NRR in that it measures the long-term health of any SaaS business. Keep in mind the below tips when deciding:

• NRR is a good metric for customer success when you are considering growth. It’s what you need to focus on finding the perfect product-market fit to attain a high GRR. A high GRR is only possible when your customers find your product useful and continue their business with you.

• Remember that when it comes to funding opportunities, your prospective investors will closely scrutinize your GRR. Between two businesses with high NRR, investors are more likely to place their bets on the business that has a higher GRR.

• NRR and MRR go hand-in-hand. So as you continue to chase growth and scale new heights, ensure that you are seeking a better market fit for your product.

• Regardless of whether NRR or GRR is the priority, track both metrics carefully. Make use of a holistic subscription billing solution to capture insights from the payment process for strategic decision-making. Such solutions can help you gather relevant data about your business’s expansion, contraction, and churned revenue.

• A good way of determining whether you are on the right path with your customer success metric is to determine the quality of NRR and GRR. While the standard benchmark varies across sectors, the closer your GRR is to 100%, the better the health of your company. Similarly, if your NRR is anywhere above 100%, your business is growing rapidly. 

Wrapping Up

Retaining existing customers should be at the top of the to-do list of any SaaS company.

GRR and NRR are not just calculations to measure dollar value. These metrics of customer success are crucial as they show you your customer’s journey and their success with your product/service.

Optimizing your NRR and GRR makes a world of difference when you are going for funding. To give your company the best chance of securing success, such customer success metrics should be explored and improved upon.

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Key Insights

• The buzz around RevOps continues to build, with companies adding new roles at a record pace

• One of the reasons why RevOps is gaining such unprecedented traction is its potential of bringing together different teams

• Businesses looking at unleashing the potential of RevOps must utilize the emerging trends for overall business transformation

In many of the fastest-growing B2B organizations, Revenue Operations or RevOps can be seen as the newest functional team.

A report by LeanData highlights that almost 58% of B2B organizations have put a dedicated RevOps team in place or are in the process of building one. 

RevOps can be defined as an organizational function dedicated to streamlining operational processes in order to provide alignment across the revenue journey, including sales, marketing, customer success, and support. 

Since the ultimate goal of any business is to increase revenue, it makes sense to have revenue operations as the main component of a company’s structure, influencing decisions made by all departments. 

So, with the continued rise of RevOps, what can we expect in 2022? Let’s take a look. 

The Top 5 RevOps Trends for Business Success in 2022 

1. The Rise in RevOps Job Titles

The RevOps role is fairly new and interesting. 

With the boom we see in tech startups, it is natural for companies to look for new roles to solve new business challenges. 

Job titles with the word “revenue” such as Director of Revenue Operations, VP of Revenue Operations, and Chief Revenue Officer have become a big trend on job posting platforms like LinkedIn

With new roles opening up in revenue operations, we see new technology for RevOps as well. Such technological innovation defines the very core of RevOps by ensuring that your teams, data, and processes are all in perfect sync. 

2. Decreased Focus on Historical Trends

Typically, those in RevOps had the option of looking at past data to evaluate and assess what to expect the following year. 

2020, however, was not your typical year. 

What it did teach us is that we cannot flip a switch and go back to “normal”. Instead, we adapted, incorporating external factors into our forecast, and developed a plan that optimizes growth. 

Organizations relying on historical data must take into account the rapidly-changing conditions and behave proactively to scale the success ladder with RevOps. 

3. Streamlining Processes with Automation

Your RevOps team cannot work without robust integration and automation backing up your technological stack. 

A unified tech stack will allow RevOps teams to be more efficient by providing transparency across all processes. It can help in better allocation of resources and increase the collaborative flow of work. 

Additionally, businesses can improve efficiency, fix revenue pipeline, and make more data-driven decisions with process automation. 

When different departments are looking at different numbers, it is even more difficult to align toward a common vision. Combating this problem requires automation that takes care of quality control processes.

4. Increased Focus on CAS

Customer Acquisition Security or CAS has become the new core area and focuses on eliminating the fast-growing problem of fake users and bots from customers’ funnels, campaigns, analytics, and CRMs. 

Even Sales and Business Development Representatives (BDR) teams can benefit from CAS by using it to clean up their CRM, helping them to reduce the time wasted on prospecting fake users. 

A White Ops survey shows how 22% of companies believe that at least 25% of their first-party database is populated by fake and fraudulent contacts. 

CAS can eliminate these problems, helping BDR teams to go after real leads who are most likely to convert. 

5. A Central Component of CX

While a necessary function of modern business, teams in marketing, sales, or customer success often tend to operate in silos. 

Furthermore, they don’t define success the same way. If salespeople are focusing on sales alone, those in marketing or customer success are relying on KPIs to measure their goals. 

RevOps recognizes the need for collaboration between these teams, in not just generating and maximizing revenue but also in enhancing the overall customer experience. 

As a unified team, RevOps is best positioned to deliver a stellar customer journey. 

The Road Ahead

As stated by Matthew Volm, CEO and Co-founder of Funnel IQ, RevOps is the glue that holds the entire go-to-market function together. 

Utilizing revenue operations within your organization will enable you to better align your teams, make way for unified data and a more sophisticated tech stack in order to streamline your processes for maximum agility. 

And as the unknown continues, there has never been a better time to make a change for the better.