To successfully compete in saturated SaaS niches, having a robust product isn’t enough.

You must deliver an excellent customer experience throughout the entire customer journey to stand a chance, especially against established players.

In the article, you will learn how to build your customer experience strategy. We also share 10 customer experience best practices that will help your product exceed customer expectations and retain them long-term.

How to build a successful customer experience strategy?

Creating a customer experience involves 6 basic steps. Here’s a quick overview of what they involve.

Know your audience

To offer your customers a positive experience, you need to know who they are: their goals, motivations, pain points, and the contexts in which they work.

These are best communicated as user personas, half-imaginary characters representing typical customers.

When creating user personas, collect information about their:

• Role/position.
• Company details.
• Key stakeholders they work with.
• Jobs to be done.
• Current challenges.
• Gains of using your product.

Collect the information from multiple sources. Use market research and supplement data from product analytics and customer feedback.

User persona example.

Map out a customer journey map for each customer persona

Next map out the customer journeys for your user personas.

Why do you need multiple maps?

As their goals vary, user personas use the product differently to achieve their goals. This means different interactions at different touchpoints, all of which need to be optimized for an excellent experience.

A customer journey template will guide you through the process and help you identify the necessary information about:

• Customer journey stages.
• Objectives and needs at each stage.
• Relevant touchpoints.
• Customer emotions.
• Obstacles.

Create different in-app experiences for users

Using insights about user personas, create in-app experiences to smoothen the customer journey and help them achieve their goals.

Here are some examples:

• Interactive walkthroughs helping users discover the core product features during the activation/adoption stages.
• Banners reminding them about their credit card expiry prevent involuntary churn at the retention stage.
• Pop-up modals encouraging them to refer a friend to the product or leave a review at the advocacy stage.

Invest in customer experience management software

Customer experience management software enables organizations to track, manage, and optimize user interactions with their products.

It allows you to collect data from multiple sources, like your CRM or event tracking tools, map customer journeys, analyze user behavior, collect feedback, and use the insights to recommend personalized content and support.

You will normally need more than one app in your stack.

For example, a CDP like Segment, a CRM like Hubspot, a product experience tool like Hotjar, and a digital adoption platform like Userpilot.

Track the success of your customer experience strategy

What metrics should you track to measure the success of your CX strategy?

Depends a bit on your product. It’s normally a combination of the metrics like:

• Net Promoter Score (NPS): measures how likely customers are to recommend your product.
• Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): an indicator of overall customer satisfaction.
• Customer Effort Score (CES): a measure of how easy it is to complete a specific task.
• Customer Churn Rate: the percentage of customers who stop using your product within a certain period.
• Customer Retention Rate: the percentage of customers who keep using the product over a specific period.
• Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): the total average revenue a business can expect from a single customer account during the business relationship.
• Customer Engagement Metrics: metrics like the number of interactions per customer, average session duration, and frequency of visits.

It’s a lot of data to monitor but it can be easily done if your analytics platform allows you to create custom dashboards.

Iterate and improve your strategy

Is your customer experience strategy ready? Not really. It never is.

Let me explain:

You need to stay on top of the evolving customer needs and expectations, monitor the success of your CX initiatives, and constantly adjust them. To stay relevant.

10 customer experience best practices in SaaS

With the customer experience strategy framework in place, you can now look at ways to put it into action.

Here are 10 customer experience best practices that we’ve found to work.

1. Exceed customer expectations with personalization

Personalization makes the customer feel valued and understood. Most importantly, it enables them to get their jobs done without unnecessary distractions.

This involves:

• Targeting users with marketing assets showcasing functionality relevant to their use cases.
• Creating multiple landing pages tailored to various persona needs.
• Profile new customers via welcome surveys.
• Building onboarding experiences guiding them directly to value.
• Customizing product UI to make it more intuitive for different users.

2. A/B test different experiences

A/B tests allow you to compare 2 different experiences in terms of performance.

For example, you could compare two 2 different landing pages, ad copies, or onboarding flows to see which converts better.

The main benefit?

Experimentation removes all the guesswork from the process. You get real-life insights that help you make informed decisions. And all this involves small cohorts without disrupting the majority of the customer base.

3. Continuously educate your customers on your industry and product

Customer education helps customers understand your product as an antidote to their pains. It helps them maximize their product value and more importantly, achieve their goals.

Take our next webinar as an example. It focuses on a specific use case: enterprise and complex product onboarding.

Such products are challenging because it’s difficult to showcase their value. So we expect the webinar to be well-attended, not only by existing customers.

4. Offer self-service channels for higher customer satisfaction

Picture this: it’s Friday, 7 pm, and you’re putting the finishing touches to a report before wrapping up for your long-awaited vacation. But your new software doesn’t play ball and you’re at your wits’ end trying to figure out how to generate it.

You get on the phone to the customer support team but they’re long gone for the weekend.

Fortunately, an AI-powered chatbot directs you to a relevant resource center module, where a video tutorial takes you through the process.

Self-service resources save the day. And your vacation.

5. Collect customer feedback regularly

Customer feedback serves 2 main purposes:

• It helps you track the overall customer sentiment to measure the effectiveness of your customer success efforts.
• Identify unmet customer needs and opportunities to satisfy them.

The best part?

You can collect it easily via automatically recurring in-app surveys. So once you set it up, it runs at regular intervals and you can focus on analyzing the results.

6. Build an omnichannel customer experience strategy

Customer experience isn’t limited to user behavior inside the product. It involves interactions with your brand across multiple channels.

For example, they may hear about your product from a Reddit thread or learn about your webinars from social media posts.

As a business, you need to shape the customer experience across all channels, and this requires a comprehensive strategy.

The strategy should consider the needs and preferences of your customers and the qualities of the channels. For example, Twitter X can be great for announcing a new feature but not for teaching customers how to use it.

7. Provide proactive customer service

When dealing with customer pain points, you have two options: wait for them to arise and act only then, or anticipate problems and support users proactively to prevent issues from escalating.

The latter approach is way more cost-effective and safer.

In SaaS, you can do it by analyzing user behavior in-app to identify friction points and creating in-app experiences that guide users through the bottlenecks.

8. Increase customer lifetime value with continuous onboarding

When users first sign up for the product, they can only adopt basic features. These are enough to get the taste of what the product offers but not to realize its full value or satisfy all their needs.

That’s why good onboarding never stops.

After the primary stage, secondary onboarding focuses on advanced functionality. This is followed by tertiary onboarding aimed at driving account expansion and promoting customer advocacy.

This keeps customers engaged, builds their loyalty, and increases customer value.

9. Build lasting customer relationships

There are a few things you can do to strengthen the relationships with your customers that improve their customer experience (and ensure a stable revenue stream):

• Product communities give users a sense of belonging, provide networking opportunities, and enable them to share best practices and resources and seek support.
• Loyalty programs reward users for their ongoing support of your product.
• Referral programs increase user commitment to your brand and incentivize them to promote it.

10. Measure customer effort score (CES) after key interactions

As mentioned, customer effort score (CES) measures how easy it is to complete a task within a product.

It’s measured through surveys that ask users to grade their experience on a scale, for example, 1-5.

To get valid results from your surveys, launch them contextually, the moment the user completes the action. the experience is still fresh in their minds.

This is easily done if your feedback tool supports event-based triggering.

How to build a winning customer experience strategy with Userpilot

If you need a tool to build an effective customer experience strategy, Userpilot may be what you’re looking for.

As a product growth platform, Userpilot offers features for impactful user engagement in-app.

It supports a range of UI patterns (tooltips, modals, slideouts, banners, hotspots, driven actions) which you can use individually or combine into walkthroughs to onboard customers, provide in-app guidance, announce new features, and drive upsells/cross-sells.

There’s also a resource center functionality for self-service support.

Userpilot provides a survey template library, so you can easily create most industry-standards surveys. Just pick a template, customize it in the WYSIWYG editors, and set the audience segments and when to launch it (time/date or event-based).

Finally, there are analytics features so you can analyze in-app user behavior. That’s how you can gather data-driven insights necessary to optimize the user experience.

The features include:

• User segmentation.
• Custom event tracking.
• Funnels.
• Paths.
• Trends analysis.
• Retention analysis.
• Custom dashboards.

Conclusion

A customer experience strategy ensures you optimize all customer journey touchpoints and consistently engage customers. To satisfy their needs and make interactions with the product fulfilling and frustration-free.

If you’d like to learn more about implementing the 10 customer service best practices with Userpilot, book the demo!

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