In the coming year, or months really, it will be identifying and preventing customer churn that software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies and product-as-a-service (PaaS) brands will live and die by, but currently most of these organizations are struggling to measure 'account health.'
UserIQ surveyed 150 customer success leaders and found that 55 percent of them indicated that measuring account health and user behavior is their biggest challenge to retaining customers.
Their biggest challenges to reducing churn, the report states, are defining churn indicators and gathering customer health information, getting intelligence on how users behave to make sure they are reaching their goals and knowing what to do to get customers back on track if they lose momentum.
"The results show that SaaS companies need a dedicated customer success platform to help them align with sales and marketing, gain visibility into customer health, and scale," said Aaron Aycock, CEO and co-founder at UserIQ. "The teams that manage to simplify and use software to bear the workload, rather than contribute to it, will be best poised to set the standard for best-in-class companies in 2017."
UserIQ suggests five current customer success trends (for the betterment of revenue potential):
- Cross-department alignment (especially with marketing and sales teams) will be key to improving product adoption and the overall customer journey.
- Better user intelligence will be important in the coming year as teams aim to understand customer health, minimize churn and develop more proactive initiatives.
- Retention and expansion initiatives will be largely dependent on whether or not CS teams can scale effectively through technologies and process over increases in headcount.
- Client referrals and advocacy are being under-prioritized, because teams have yet to make a clear shift from playing a reactive support role to playing a more proactive part in customer engagement.
- A more efficient technology stack will be key to helping teams understand, scale, and improve their relationships with key accounts and move toward initiatives focused on growing their customers in the years to come.