9 Mistakes To Avoid In SaaS Implementation

Everyone in an enterprise SaaS organization knows the importance of creating a customer-centric onboarding and SaaS implementation process. It serves as the base for providing customer experience and satisfaction, which helps in customer retention. Statistics depict that a 5% increase in customer retention can help you raise your profits from 25-95%.

However, not all SaaS organizations have a proper onboarding and implementation process.

While customer onboarding helps the customers get acquainted with your product/service, SaaS implementation is a never-ending phase. You will work daily to ensure that the customer uses your product and clear any hiccups they may encounter while using your product/service.

Making mistakes is as important as following the best practices. You may have a dedicated team and project manager to handle the projects, but the customers are unsatisfied. Then there is a high chance that you are making these mistakes.

9 Common Mistakes In SaaS Implementation

Some implementation mistakes commonly happening in a SaaS enterprise are given below.

1. Poor Handoff

Mistakes:

• Thinking that the sales department’s job is over after they have sold your service/product to the client.
• Signing the deal without understanding the client’s requirements.
• Not transferring information about the client's needs to the product and tech team.  

Solutions:

The sales team must connect with the client. The meeting held should help understand the client. A proper onboarding process should be in place to avoid miscommunication during SaaS implementation. Customer onboarding designed with a customer-centric approach will help the customer feel easy and smooth during the initial stage.

2. Missing Focal Points

Mistakes:

• Trying to sell your service/product by showing off the expensive features.
• Not understanding the customer's pain points.
• Overwhelming the customer with information.

Solutions:

Every enterprise SaaS would have been started to solve an issue. But as years pass, the organization needs to remember the reason behind its product/service. As a part of the organization, you may feel your product is the best, but it won’t matter if your customer does not use it properly.

Please avoid this mistake of overseeing customers’ problems during the SaaS implementation. Try and understand your customer’s concerns, pain points, and needs before explaining all those fancy features.  

3. Lack Of Strategy

Mistakes:

• Going with the flow attitude in onboarding can be messy.
• Having a stagnant onboarding process for all the customers.
• Overpromising during the onboarding stage.
• Bombarding the customers by explaining all the features.

Solutions:

Once you understand your customer’s pain points, create a strategy that will solve your customer’s problems and deliver value to them. Customize your default onboarding and kick-off meetings by showing them how your product can solve their problems. Remember not to get too excited and go overboard. Promise them only what you can achieve. Since the SaaS implementation is ever going, it is better to leave out some features that can be explored by the customer later as a surprise.

4. Improper Work Structure

Mistakes:

• Not having a designated team for each customer.
• Not fixing a delivery date.
• Using silos of tools for communication.

Solutions:

Yes, you and the customer have signed a deal, but it only begins from there. You must plan the team members, team leader, project manager, SPOC, cross-functional collaboration, and delivery date. Decide when and through what channel the stakeholders and customers will communicate.

Plan the training period based on your customer’s capacity and skill. You must create a proper workflow structure during SaaS implementation to maximize the output with value and not burden your customers or team members.

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5. Ineffective Training

Training is the mid-major step between the onboarding and the implementation process. You should be very careful and avoid making mistakes at this stage.

Mistakes:

• A training team is handling the customers.
• Not knowing the customer’s needs before training.
• Not aware of the team that is going to work with the client.
• Providing mechanical speech about the product and how it works.
• Not having explanatory videos.

Solutions:

Your team that works on the project should conduct the training to understand the customer’s expectations clearly and explain the product features appropriately. Small videos explaining your product's characteristics and usage will be useful whenever the customer wants to check for information or clear any doubt.

6. Lack Of Communication

Mistakes:

• It isn’t a single-person job.
• Relying on email chains and documents for information and data retrieval.

Solutions:

Your team members and other cross-functional teams should work together to complete a single project. There should be a proper channel to communicate between the teams and the customers so that they are aware of each other’s work during SaaS implementation.

A centralized platform will help to avoid miscommunication or lack of communication.

7. Lack Of Automation

Mistakes:

• Having to do everything manually.
• Using silos of tools.
• Not being aware of the revenue risks.

Solutions:

Customer onboarding and implementation are the heart and brain of an enterprise SaaS organization that helps customer retention. Automating these two would lessen the burden of a SaaS enterprise by heaps.

An SSOT that helps with cross-functional collaboration, task prioritization, and revenue risk visualization would be apt to manage your hundreds of clients simultaneously.

8. Lack Of Transparency

Mistakes:

• Customers wait for standard calls or meetings to know the progress.
• Not updating the follow-ups.
• Not informing the mishaps or priority changes.

Solutions:

Most customers wait for weekly or monthly meetings to know the project's progress. This can annoy the customer at one point or another. You must inform the customer about the progress of the work. Yet many organizations need to do this during SaaS implementation.

Again an automated tool can help you achieve transparency where the customers can follow up regularly and assess the progress by themselves.

9. Lack Of Concern

Mistakes:

• Forgetting to view customer success as your success.
• Not appreciating their success.
• Lack of engagement.

Solutions:

Recognize small milestones that your team has helped your customers to achieve. Congratulate them whenever they reach their short-term goals. It shows that you value their achievements and success as yours. It is also a great way to stay connected to them. By doing this in the SaaS implementation stage, your customer will develop a reasonable opinion of your organization which can help lower customer churn.

Wrap Up

To summarize, always be customer-centric while onboarding and implementing your service/product. Each one of your customers is important and a high priority. Hence, you cannot afford to be lethargic or make mistakes that can cost you heavily.

This is as simple as it gets. Have best practices in place to reduce customer churn. Likewise, avoid mistakes to increase customer retention.