Customer Success Blog

🍩 Does taking over 30 thousand steps in 2 days justify eating doughnuts for breakfast?

I hope so … my feet are sore but I’m feeling optimistic after spending 2 days at SaaS Nordic's Saasiest2023 conference in Malmo, southern Sweden.

I attended to get a live sense of how SaaS companies are feeling about the technology that drives Customer Success in 2023. I had 19 meetings with CEOs, CROs and Heads of CS from Nordic SaaS companies. What is clear is that ...

We sometimes share content from partner companies. Below, Patryk Kępa from Elastic Email discusses their framework for delivering Customer Support in a SaaS environment.

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How do we at Elastic Email, successfully communicate with customers to help maintain long-term valuable relationships?

We believe it all starts with an empathic mindset. We are very aware that many of our users are not technical or familiar with integrating our solution into their processes, so it is important to listen to each client and cater to their individual needs. We find starting our customer relationships this way ensures our users are much more likely to meet and exceed their stated objectives.

Elastic Email Customer Support Engagement Framework

Tldr: skip to the bottom 👇 to access a spreadsheet that calculates the Return-on-Investment (ROI) of a Customer Success platform PLUS a quick explainer video on how to use the spreadsheet.

Customer Success Platforms (CSPs) are designed to move the needle on Net Revenue Retention (NRR). Improving your rate of NRR directly impacts your SaaS company's revenues and profitability. So, why delay? Just invest in one and get on with growing your revenues, right?

Whoa! Maybe (probably), but there is a lot to consider before signing up to a CSP.

This is a decision that will impact the entire business. Data from every dusty corner of your tech stack can be passed into the CSP and, in return, the CSP will ensure insightful data will be shared back across the business, adding value to every customer interaction. This will (should) influence the effectiveness of Customer Success, Sales, Support and back-office operations, ultimately resulting in less churn and higher per-customer revenues.

But, it also requires buy-in from all of the relevant departmental stakeholders. Most importantly, you will need to involve your IT department, as they will have to manage the integration, configuration and maintenance of some (or all) of the data sources. There is also the friction around change management to be considered, building confidence that this is the right decision and driving adoption of the new solution to maximize the returns.

So, speaking of returns, whether you are making this decision yourself or lobbying for a new solution internally, it's vital that you have a solid understanding of the kind of benefits you expect to accrue, i.e. what is the expected Return-on-Investment (ROI).

Below I share a simple spreadsheet to help you calculate the ROI. To use it you will need to plug in the following information:

• Your Annual Churn Rate
• Your Annual Expansion Rate
• Your Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)
• The Annual Cost of the CSP Software you are Considering
• Your Goals (%) for Churn & Expansion
  

The short explainer video below 👇 walks you through how best to use the spreadsheet [the sheet is very simple but needs to be used in a specific order 😊].

As part of a series of short [15-minute] demo/webinars to address some of the key topics in Customer Success. We delivered a session entitled ... A Practical Guide to Customer Health Scoring ...

In less than 15 minutes, we reviewed:

• What is a Customer Health Score and do you need one?
• What Data should you include and are they associated risks?
• A demonstration of how to practically construct and apply a Customer Health Score.

As part of a series of short [15-minute] demo/webinars to address some of the key topics in Customer Success. We delivered a session focused on ... The 360 Customer View ...

In less than 15 minutes, we looked at

• Why a 360 View is important
• What types of data you should include
• How to centralize all of your customer data
• What the final results can look like

Join team Akita for a series of 15-minute, no-nonsense, speed demos 🏃

Register Below 👇👇.

We will examine how Customer Success technology can help CSMs move from a complex world of siloed data and manual processes to a place where managing customers is simple.

[TLDR ... You can watch a webinar I gave covering the same ground as this post at the bottom of the page 👇]

It's a scary time for SaaS. 

With continued pressure from investors to grow in the face of plummeting demand and no real understanding of when or how the economy is likely to rebound, the future is uncertain. As new customers become as rare as hens teeth, finding a way to grow is going to become progressively more difficult.

Unfortunately, there is no magic solution … or is there?

In a previous post, we looked at How We Built More Than 100 Customer Success-Integrations between Akita and apps like Hubspot, Salesforce, Intercom and Zendesk. We outlined our 3-step process for keeping data in sync: Schedule, Retrieve, and Process.

The Scheduler kicks everything off and is responsible for determining which data needs retrieving at any given time.

If there is one thing that sets Akita apart from its competitors in Customer Success software, it is our ability to ingest data from virtually any data source a customer may have. This includes:

• Visitor behavior captured by our Javascript SDK or Segment.com;
• Customer data sent to Akita using our RESTful API;
• 3rd-party integrations using publicly available APIs;
• Cloud databases and data warehouses; and
• Even retrieving data from a customers own API.

If the data is out there, Akita can usually import it and use it to transform your Customer Success department into a well oiled machine!

But writing integrations are hard! How do you do it?

It is hard.