22 Ideas to Improve SaaS Customer Retention

Improving customer retention is imperative for SaaS companies. Higher retention leads to reduced churn, increased expansion revenue, lower acquisition costs,  greater efficiencies, and better brand reputation. The compounding benefits mean investing in loyalty pays dividends across the business, boosting growth and profitability. For metrics-driven SaaS companies, retention is a high priority KPI. Focusing on delighting customers and enriching their journey leads to success. We’ve assembled some straightforward ideas to improve SaaS customer retention.

1. Proactively check in with your customers. Schedule regular calls or (if possible) in-person meetings to touch base regarding needs, issues, and feedback. Keep detailed notes and follow-up where required.

2. Send surveys to measure NPS and satisfaction. Measure NPS and CSAT using in-product, email, or third-party surveys.

3. Identify at-risk accounts based on usage data and engagement. Regularly monitor usage data, NPS, and engagement metrics to find potentially dissatisfied accounts. Develop health scorecards.

4. Conduct quarterly business reviews to align on goals. Evaluate trends in usage and ROI for the past quarter. Review the impact of strategy with senior stakeholders.

5. Create educational nurture streams that share tips and best practices to drive adoption via email and in-app messaging.

6. Develop playbooks to onboard customers efficiently. Document your processes to effectively ramp and integrate customers.

7. Monitor adoption and feature usage so you can promote areas for greater system utilization.

8. Publish case studies demonstrating customer success stories. Work with your marketing team to create case studies and testimonials that illustrate high-value use cases.

9. Offer training webinars and office hours to build skills and proficiency.

10. Solicit user feedback through focus groups, interviews, shadowing, and surveys to identify pain points and generate new ideas.

11. Assign technical account managers (TAMs) to provide hands-on guided onboarding and ongoing optimization for larger accounts.

12. Staff appropriately with Customer Success Managers (CSMs). Assign them by customer accounts and market segments.

13. Segment support levels based on customer needs. Tailor service levels by customer size, and consider offering a premium support tier.

14. Provide quick responses and issue resolution. Customer success hinges on fast responses, ticket SLAs, and well-managed escalation paths.

15. Implement alerts to notify you in advance of expiring contracts. Touch base with accounts requiring renewal.

16. Analyze reasons for churn to address weak points. Conduct exit surveys & interviews (third party services work better) to understand reasons for cancellations.

17. Upsell and cross-sell additional products judiciously. When suitable, offer complementary products.

18. Solicit insights from power users to guide your roadmap. Promote a customer advisory council and support events.

19. Recognize loyal customers. Spotlight them in communications and events.

20. Integrate help desk and customer success data with your CRM for 360-degree visibility. Unified data gives more insight to your business.

21. Provide API and developer documentation. Make it easy for development teams to integrate and build on top of your platform.

22. Monitor social media to monitor the pulse of sentiment. Engage in discussions using positive language, even with trolls.