Customer Success Can Be Even More Successful
Customer Success is the new growth engine for B2B SaaS companies.
That’s right, you heard me. And as B2B SaaS businesses are beginning to accept it, they should also start treating them that way. The days in which Customer Success departments had to convince upper management that their existence is fundamental should be officially over.
It has been proven time and time again that the successful SaaS businesses are the ones who are able to both expand and retain their existing customer base. But in order to achieve that, companies must invest resources in customer success at least as much as they invest in other functions in the organisation.
Making Customers Successful is Not an Easy Task
Customer Success teams face countless challenges — Increasing renewal rates by ensuring ongoing successful outcomes for customers, expanding revenue from existing customers by identifying the right match between the user’s needs and the value of the product, encouraging advocacy and positive word-of-mouth and aligning the entire company (namely R&D, product, support and management) with the customer, to name a few.
But the greatest challenge of all, is taking care of the above in a proactive manner. This is the holy grail of customer success.
Timing is Everything
Why being proactive matters so much? The following story might sound familiar to you:
On a sunny day, completely out of the blue, a client says that he has decided to leave.
״Wait, what? But we spoke in the last QBR and she said the product is great! What happened?״
It turned out that shortly after the QBR, the client began facing challenges using the product, which lead to a decline in usage, adoption and ultimately a negative ROI for the user. At some point, the client began searching for alternatives and swiftly found a solution that better suited his needs.
When you fail to identify on time that a client is not getting what he signed up for — you have a problem. Without real-time predictive abilities, companies are left with no choice but to react to problems, often fighting an already lost battle. And we see it happening again and again. Our studies show that when you approach an account too late, your chances of retaining that account drop by approximately 80%.
Rules Are Made To Be Broken
In an effort to be proactive and identify the right clients on time, companies all around the globe are searching for a solution. With the lack of such, they are trying to come up with different methodologies in-house in order to forecast whether a customer is likely to churn or is ripe for a revenue expansion opportunity.
Some companies try to define rules or alerts after long round table brainstorming sessions with the outcome being a measure, also known as a “health score”. These health scores are manual, subjective (might be valid for some accounts but not for others) and most importantly they are not predictive.
In reality, every customer is different. There is no one global rule to “rule them all”, and the story of every customer is more complicated than “did not login in the past 30 days”. For one client opening numerous support tickets could be a great sign, while for others it could mean a total disaster. I could go on and on with examples but if you’ve tried defining health scores within your company, then you probably know what I’m talking about.
Meanwhile other companies try to visualize some of their data by creating BI reports in order to drive actions and reach conclusions from those charts and graphs.
The end result of both is a struggle, with too many customer risk alerts (false positives), poor accuracy, lack of visibility into the entire story and not enough lead time to take an effective action.
The Journey Begins
That is why we’ve created Perceptive AI, and I couldn’t be happier to announce the launch of our product!
We are absolutely thrilled to be building the first platform of its kind to employ artificial intelligence in order to help B2B SaaS companies predict, analyze and act upon early signals of churn and revenue expansion opportunities. We empower customer success teams by harnessing cutting-edge data science and machine learning technology, to make it possible to accurately predict and understand the customer’s next move.
We believe that our game-changing AI-driven product, developed and designed with domain experts from both the customer success and AI worlds, will solve the specific challenges of customer success, and will transform the way companies run their customer success operations.
Finally, at last, companies will be able to focus their efforts on engaging with the right customers, and not on identifying them.
If you would like to find out more, please don’t hesitate to reach out or visit us at prcptv.ai
