9 Implementation mistakes that unfortunately every enterprise SaaS makes. These are the checkboxes that they overlook during the implementation process.
Everyone who works in an enterprise SaaS organization knows the importance of creating a customer-centric onboarding and implementation process. It serves as the base for providing customer experience and satisfaction which in turn 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 in place. Click here to know the best onboarding and implementation practices.
While customer onboarding helps the customers get acquainted with your product/service, SaaS implementation is a never ending phase. You will work day in and day out to ensure that the customer uses your product and clear any hiccups they may come across while using your product/service.
Not making mistakes is as important as following the best practices. There are chances that you might have a dedicated team and project manager to handle the projects yet somehow the customers are not feeling satisfied. Then there is a high chance that you are making these mistakes.
Some of the implementation mistakes that commonly happen in a Saas enterprise are given below.
Sales team must connect the management and the client. The meeting held should be useful to understand the requirements of the client. To avoid miscommunication during SaaS implementation, a proper onboarding process should be in place. Customer onboarding designed with a customer-centric approach will help the customer to feel easy and smooth during the initial stage.
Every enterprise SaaS would have been started to solve an issue. But as years go by, the organization forgets the reason behind its product/service. As a part of the organization, you may feel that your product is the best but it won’t matter if your customer does not use it properly.
Please avoid this mistake of overseeing customer’s problems during the SaaS implementation. Try and understand your customer’s concerns, pain points, and needs before explaining all those fancy features.
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 evergoing, it is better to leave out some features that can be explored by the customer later as a surprise.
Yes, you and the customer have signed a deal but it only begins from there. You need to 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 would communicate.
Plan the training period based on your customer’s capacity and skill. You have to create a proper workflow structure during SaaS implementation to maximize the output with value and not burden your customers or team members.
Training can be considered as the mid-major step between onboarding and implementation process. You should be very careful and avoid making mistakes at this stage.
Your team that works on the project should conduct the training so that they understand the customer’s expectations clearly and explain the product features appropriately. Small videos that explain about the features and usage of your product will come handy whenever the customer wants to check for information or clear the doubt.
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.
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 at the same time.
Most customers wait for their weekly or monthly meetings to know the progress of the project. This can annoy the customer at one point or another. It is your duty to inform the customer about the progress of the work. Yet many organizations fail 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.
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 good opinion about your organization which can help in lowering customer churn.
To summarize, always have a customer-centric approach while onboarding and implementing your service/product. Each one of your customers are important and 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.