3 Tips for Improving Customer Engagement in SaaS Applications


Guy Nirpaz is the CEO and co-founder of Totango, which analyzes user actions on SaaS applications, providing sales teams invaluable information in qualifying prospects and prioritizing people to contact who are most likely to buy (or renew).

Customer engagement is key for software-as-a-service (SaaS) businesses. Correct interpretation of consumer actions is the basis for running a successful SaaS business. However, determining what your users choose to do in your application can be difficult.

Below are three tips to improve customer engagement for SaaS companies.

1. Understand and Track User Actions

To increase customer engagement, you first need to understand wh! at engag es them and how. In an SaaS environment, this means understanding the actions they take on your application, and the nature by which they use it.

Define an engagement score by combining key metrics, such as the time they spend using the solution, the frequency in which they visit and the core actions they perform. Interaction with your support and marketing material is also a factor in measuring customer engagement. That way, you can improve and replicate across your customer base.

2. Deliver Their Needs

The same tools that help you measure and understand customer behavior should help you draw conclusions about the actions needed to improve.

  • Do the new features add value or complexity?
  • Is the new design helping to convert more trials, but causing friction for existing customers?
  • Do tutorials and guides help new users, or do users continue to become lost?
  • Are users from the basic plan engaged enough that they are pushing through to the premium packages?

3. Evolve Your Service

Its easy to fall into the trap of treating your customers as unknown, faceless people. After all, chances are no one in your organization has ever met them.

A SaaS company must develop tools that will help its service measure customer behavior. These tools must be capable of answering key strategic and tactical questions to help evolve the product portfolio to engage current and future customers in deeper and richer ways.

  • Have the users tried the service more than once?
  • How much time are users investing in your service?
  • Which features have they used?
  • Do they fully understand the value proposition of your offering?

Customer engagement can help answer some tough product and marketing questions. The key is to determine which parts of your product different users utilize, and to target users directly for primary market research. After all, if you provide an online destination that people want to visit, ! you will increase brand awareness, drive people to your service and end up engaging your customers all over again.

Image courtesy of Flickr, Kaptain Kobold

More About: Business, contributor, customer engagement, features, SaaS



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