Best Practices in Customer Success
For any B2B software company, the process of on-boarding new customers is a vital step toward successful adoption. However, if you’re a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) provider, that critical opportunity is easily missed. Unlike traditional on-premises software, SaaS does not require an extensive IT preparation and set up process.
After all, much of the promise of SaaS comes through the vendor taking responsibility for deploying, managing and monitoring cloud software and servers for customers. Set up for a solution like Media Shuttle can be as simple as buying a subscription and starting to use the product, no training necessary. As such, SaaS vendors can be completely hands off.
Alex Rioux
However, they would miss the opportunity to understand new customers’ unique business use cases and to educate them on how the product can be customized to address them. At Signiant, we’ve found that long-term customer success is predicated on building a relationship that starts before the first file transfers.
Every new customer at Signiant gets assigned a personal customer success manager to ensure that the product is being utilized in the most efficient way for their business. Hence the reason why leaders of customer success teams like Signiant’s Alexandra Rioux (a.k.a. Alex) are so vital.
Understanding Each Customer’s Use Case
“We want to make sure new customers see real value from the beginning, which means we need to understand their business, whether it’s big or small, and their unique use cases,” says Alex.
Signiant’s customer success team also makes sure customers see the potential value our products bring. Typically, customers will start out with a smaller number of users in their business. For example, with Media Shuttle, our SaaS solution for large file transfers, it may start out being used by one team like video production but eventually move to all teams who need to securely send and share large files quickly. Customer success managers not only help them get immediate value, but also to understand new opportunities as the product roles out across their business.
“Ultimately, our main priority is to makes sure our clients are happy,” says Alex.
In the process of onboarding new customers, customer success works side by side with the support team to make sure everything is deployed and working in the customer’s environment.
