In the background of growing challenges around the increasing cost of managing the resources, high hardware/storage cost, and the need for high speed and scalability along with the maturing economy in conjunction, the advent and growth of SaaS (which in nutshell a way of delivering software and applications over the internet via a subscription model) have been multifold in the last decade.
While SaaS carter to both Business to Customer (B2C) and Business to Business (B2B) models our focus discussion with being around the B2B model and what challenges a customer success department (CSD) is trying to solve for B2B SaaS Business.
The Underlying Challenges of B2B Saas Business
With the focus of SaaS companies getting into a paradigm shift from customer acquisition to customer retention, understanding customer behavior and their choices has become of paramount importance and highly crucial for the companies. A SaaS B2B model might be susceptible to multiple challenges such as:
- Not creating a clear customer onboarding process – Overwhelming prospective customers in the app or website with an array of CTA buttons, pop-ups, tutorials, and subscriptions.
- The unpredictability of customer behavior around renewal/termination- thus no predictability around churning.
- Availability of lagging/reactive indicators rather than leading indicators.
- Standing out of the crowd.
- Creating a practical business model
- Not attaining rapid growth
Account segmentation:
An obstacle will be experience mismatch because the audience’s requirements, knowledge, and skills all vary. For SaaS startups, account segmentation is still a challenge to the availability of analytical data rather than focused data,
when creating a customized customer journey using the data, trends, and statistics that have been gathered.
KPI monitoring
According to a survey report, 50% of the CS teams acknowledged that their businesses use bottom-up estimation methodologies and don’t track financial metrics like ARR.
Lack of customer engagement
The right technology mix and excellent resources are needed to design customer engagement for retention, which can be a laborious job with feedback loops, peer-to-peer (P2P) engagement, managing online communities, and consistent follow-ups.
How to Overcome the Challenges of B2B Saas Business
While a B2B SaaS might be struggling with big churns and high unpredictability around customer behavior, a new age of Customer Success Departments providing AI and ML-based solutions can provide warning signals which can predict the health of the client, thus in nutshell an amplifying action-based approach depending on the potential of the risk taken by a customer.
- Traditional B2B SAAS works with legacy analytical platforms to predict customer behavior which might be 99% noise is another potential challenge it may face. This underlying problem is solved to a great extent by the Customer Success department. CSD filters the noise from the data thereby proving only that 1% of actionable data is important for making a decision.
- Lagging indicators is another reason which might result in creating a detour around the success of the B2B SaaS model. The customer Success department though its daily hundred of thousands of tracking point and with the application of Big Data/AI produce a proactive rather than a reactive solution to deal with actionable points to handle potential churn.
- Is your SaaS selling a $100 technology or a $100,000 technology? A well-organized customer Success department would be able to drive answers around the expectation of the customers and assist in answering questions like which customers require handholding, how much complexity the client is facing in navigating /using the technology, and how adaptative they are towards the solution served. Patterns of data served by the Customer Success department will help answer all these questions.
There is multiple B2B SaaS business model which operates with very similar offerings, in this competitive environment standing out of the crowd is something that could determine the long-term existence of the business. A customer success department with its integrated workflow provides actionable dedicated customer-centric data, categorized based on the stage of the customer lifecycle. These prompt decision such as upselling, risk of churn, struggling with the interface, etc. in total assists a B2B SaaS business in standing out and soaring above its competition.
FAQ’s
What does Customer Success do?
Customer success software automates the process of merging the customer data you already have in your tech stack to provide you with a 360-degree perspective of your customers.
Why do you need a Customer Success Tool?
Automation promotes proactive, tailored interaction, which results in a more consistent experience, boosts renewals, and lowers expenses. You may automate operations like assigning accounts to team members using Customer Success solutions.
What is B2B Saas?
It refers to cloud-based software that businesses utilize for a variety of purposes, including accounting, office efficiency, customer relationship management (CRM), and other work-related duties.
Conclusion
To conclude SaaS charges its customer based on the subscription and value it delivers to its customer. A well-organized Customer Success department can to a great extent help B2B SaaS business operations in generating a high-flier model adding value at all the customer lifecycle stages and also reducing cost per customer delivery.
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