Thanks to evolving technology and market saturation, customer loyalty is starting to wane in the world of SaaS solutions. With the promise of superior, faster and more advanced services, it is becoming increasingly challenging for a business to remain the attractive option.

This is a serious headache for many companies because customer retention is exceedingly valuable. Numerous studies have shown that implementing a successful retention strategy yields greater rewards than onboarding new users, and latest estimates suggest that the cost of nurturing ten existing customers is roughly the same expenditure as acquiring just one new user.

Fostering lasting relationships with your customer base makes sense economically, although building successful business connections is about a lot more than just profitability – trust, teamwork and customer satisfaction can all increase as a result.

Here are some ways that you can combat growing customer-attrition levels and ensure your business remains an attractive prospect for your customers.

Great Customer Service

To retain your customers, you’ve got to deliver great customer service. Ensuring your customers feel both valued and content with the support and services they receive can go a long way to reducing customer attrition. Good customer service primerily stems from the ability to answer your customers’ queries and concerns efficiently and offer potential solutions that are beneficial for all parties.

When dealing with any communication from your user-base, remember that time-management is critical and that there’s no quicker way to alienate your customers than to make them feel like they are being ignored. There will always be occasions when you can’t deal with the problem immediately, such as times of peak traffic, but implementing a contingency plan, such as an automatic response email, will help to alleviate any feelings of disregard that your customers may be harbouring.

Customers want to feel like they are valued, so try to personalise their customer experience as much as possible. Things like communicating on a first name basis and learning the direction and subject of customers’ businesses can help to cement the feeling of value and increase the likelihood of repeat business.

Nobody is perfect. But, when things do go wrong, admitting your flaws will help to gain you a great deal more respect than making excuses. Trust is all-important in business and no consumer wants to feel like they are being lied to. Owning up to mistakes and rectifying the situation to the best of your abilities will only serve to strengthen the relationship between you and your customer.

Download our guide to attracting more users for your SaaS business

Communication

Improving communication is a sure-fire way to guarantee an increase in your current retention levels. Your customers never want to feel like they’re in the dark, or worse, undervalued, so frequent contact is a must. Ensuring regular correspondence also enables you to better understand the concerns of your user-base and adapt accordingly.

Implementing a contact-strategy can make certain that your customers feel appreciated and reduce any sense of neglect. All successful contact-strategies begin with an analysis of the methods your business currently employs to correspond with prospects and customers, with the aim of finding the best channels of communication. Only by understanding how you best communicate with your user-base can you begin to develop a strategy for consistent, effective and useful communication.

The two most important elements of customer-communication are quantity and consistency. Ensuring that all correspondence is developed in-line with your design principles will help to reassure your customers they’re communicating with a trusted source. Meanwhile, finding the right balance of communication so that customers are engaged but don’t feel bombarded is key to consumer happiness and retention.

Reinforce Your Values

Long-term success and customer retention belongs to those who do not take ethical shortcuts. You must be consistent in what you say, what you do, what your customers experience and why your customers are able to trust you. Making sure that you are open, honest and up-front with them in all situations can help to convince them that you are a trustworthy business partner, so it is important not only to share your successes but also to take responsibility for your mistakes.

Your values represent who you are as a business and you should make the most of opportunities to remind people of what it is that you stand for. Your customers will obviously expect high-quality design, build quality, reliability and serviceability from your SaaS solutions, but you can also remind them why it is that they chose your business in the first place.

Reinforcing your values can mean anything from creating a mission statement, spreading your message on social media, writing blog posts, or even sending customer emails. Modesty is (alledgedly) a virtue, but by demonstrating to your customers that you believe in your message, and you practice what you preach, you can ensure that your business remains an attractive option to your customers.

Customer Promotion

Customer retention derives from the ability to make you customer feel like they are a valuable asset to your business. And showcasing your customers on your website, app, newsletter or other public platform can help to garner engagement, increase satisfaction and improve customer service.

Promoting your customers can have mutual benefits. Your business receives the prestige of boasting about its client success stories, whilst your featured customers receive free publicity on your platform of choice.

No matter the solution that you choose – whether it’s adding your customer’s logos to your homepage, creating a client-of-the-month feature, or building a case-studies web page which features individual reports for all your customers – make sure your customers are on board. Always ask permission when outlining and implementing this kind of strategy. In spite of the obvious benefits for a featured customer, some companies will simply not want to partake in the promotional scheme whereas others may have specific stipulations about what is required when they do feature.

Conclusion

Today, customer retention is critical to business success. For many businesses, returning customers represent the backbone of earning potential and nurturing longer-lasting relationships can be hugely beneficial.

The most fundamental aspect of customer retention is ensuring that your customer knows that they are valued. And by addressing questions, queries and concerns quickly and helpfully you can really help to strengthen your relationship. Meanwhile, employing a contact-strategy to make certain that effective communication is taking place and no customer feels like they are left in the dark can be key to consumer engagement.

Critically evaluating your principles in order to demonstrate to your customers how you ‘practise what you preach’ is important to the creation of trust. Effectively promoting your values to your customers can help to generate long-term business success, and promotion can also a valuable tool in and of itself to prevent customer attrition. Showcasing your customers will help to generate loyalty, which in turn will increase retention levels. But the increase in publicity can also help to generate a stronger bond between you and your customers, provided that they have agreed to the promotion guidelines.

As much as customer retention is critical to business success, customer acquisition is critical to business growth and expansion. For more information about how you can grow your user-database with limited effort and generate more users for your SaaS product.