15 Best Customer Experience Examples That Drive Customer Loyalty and Growth in SaaS

Customer experience examples are everywhere.

And it’s no secret that a great customer experience is essential for:

• Engaging customers.
• Driving customer loyalty.
• Increasing WOM.
• Improving customer-led growth.

But, not everyone can identify good customer experience when they see it.

Hence we’re here to show you 15 of the best examples we could find.

What is customer experience (CX)?

Customer Experience (CX) is the perception a customer has of your brand based on their interaction across all stages of the customer’s journey.

It starts when the user discovers your brand and continues even after the customer has become a promoter.

To improve CX, you can design, build, and enhance each customer interaction and touchpoint to make it as pleasant and frictionless as possible—which is what customer experience management is for.

Why is customer experience important in SaaS?

Considering the impact of recurring revenue, retention, churn, and referrals, customer experience is especially important in a B2B SaaS model.

And that’s because a smooth customer experience brings benefits that snowball into customer-led growth.

Increases customer satisfaction

First, a frictionless experience allows your customer to get their job done better and faster with your product.

And once they find it out (in short, reach the activation stage), they’ll be happy with your brand and stay for longer—ultimately improving customer satisfaction.

Drives customer loyalty

A totally satisfied customer is likely to stick with your product for longer and become a loyal customer.

But, you’ll only achieve this when you nail the customer experience in a way that delights customers constantly.

This means great CX not only improves your customer retention, but also sets the stage for building relationships with users and converting them into loyal advocates.

Drives growth through better word-of-mouth

When users become loyal customers, they’ll get happy and love your brand enough to recommend it.

Word-of-mouth happens naturally because we all love to brag about our good decisions, making us want to talk about a product we like.

Ultimately, good CX leads to this “satisfaction, then loyalty, then WOM” cycle that snowballs into more growth for your SaaS business.

What are the pillars of a great customer experience?

Customer experience is a huge topic. It takes more than a blog post to fully explain all its components, CX best practices, and the roles that each team must take.

But if you’re just starting to improve CX from a customer success environment, then here’re the three pillars you should follow.

Personalize interactions across the customer journey

You can no longer get away with a one-size-fits-all experience.

Every interaction from the moment the user starts recognizing your brand (each message, setup process, upsell) must be highly personalized.

And it’s not limited to calling users by their names.

A personalized product experience delivers value to the user according to their specific use case, job to be done (JTBD), and stage in the journey.

You must collect data and segment users based on their needs, in-app behaviors, and product usage.

Segmentation allows you to recommend new features, offer an upgrade, or send an email that’s relevant to a specific user segment (segmentation tools make it possible without coding.)

Provide a fast and helpful customer service experience

For great CX, customer service teams that solve problems fast are a must.

But what makes a customer service strategy good? Think of:

• In-app resource center with immediate access to guides and tutorials.
• Reliable chatbot that can answer common questions automatically.
• Efficient customer service team that’s available 24/7 and responds fast.
• Offering support proactively to avoid problems in the future.

In the end, you want to implement self-service support with all the above options available inside the app (so users don’t have to navigate your site to find answers):

Listening and acting on customer feedback

Communication is perhaps the most important CX pillar.

So if you want your customers to feel heard, you should listen to their feedback, act on their requests, and communicate with them to thank them for their contribution.

Or else, their feedback would feel like wasted time, and the feedback loop will die off.

15 Great customer experience examples from SaaS companies

As we promised in the intro, here are 15 of the best customer experience examples from SaaS companies.

1. Choose your own journey

If you haven’t segmented users yet, you can start offering branched onboarding flows to improve the customer experience.

It works because it allows users to get a product experience relevant to their needs and lets users feel understood, thus reducing their time to value.

An excellent example of interactive onboarding is Notion, which creates different setups based on whether you work solo or with a team.

2. The personalized empty screen

There’s nothing more disrupting than staring at an empty screen.

If you don’t want users to feel that kind of friction with your product, you have three options:

• Use welcome screen modals, onboarding checklists, or a widget that tells users what to do next.
• Fill the empty forms with example content or templates according to the user segment.
• Improve your UI design for empty states.

On Userpilot, for example, the first thing a new user sees is a button to install it in your app and an onboarding checklist that guides you through your first steps:

3. Building an emotional connection through success celebration

Celebrating milestones is a great way to improve customer experience, as it motivates users to engage with your product through dopamine hits.

This “gamified” experience results in more customer stickiness and builds relationships through emotional design.

For example, Asana plays a wholesome animation whenever you finish a task.

4. Offering self-service support options to simplify the customer service experience

Too much friction always creates a terrible customer experience.

Especially when users face a minor bug, but they have to leave your app, google your website, scroll down to find the support button, and browse through messy documentation to find answers.

As a solution, implement self-service support, so customers have instant access to fast and reliable support 24/7.

This includes an in-app help center with on-demand access to guides, video tutorials, chatbots, support reps, and more—just like the resource centers you can build with Userpilot:

5. Multiple language support using localization

Once your company grows to international levels, being available in multiple languages becomes an essential customer experience milestone.

And more than that, you can go the extra mile and localize the resources from your help center, too—making it easier for customers to stay with your brand if they can use your product in their language.

6. Educating users with in-app video tutorials for a great customer experience

Educating users is essential for customer success.

But if you don’t want to overwhelm customers with too many resources, you can improve the digital customer experience with onboarding videos and mini tutorials.

Videos make information easier to consume, so you can use them to introduce features gradually, train users inside your product, and eliminate friction.

Loom is an excellent video onboarding example, as one of the first things you see on your home screen is a set of short videos explaining how to replace meetings and use the app:

7. Great customer experience example using the product as a demo

A great tactic that brands like Loom follow is to showcase the value of the product, by using the product.

Demio is another example of this, as its product allows you to create and automate webinars to onboard users, showcase a demo, and host live events.

And of course, the first thing you’re encouraged to do when you sign up is to join one of the automated webinars created with their own product.

And once you join, you’ll get the same experience as if you were attending a live webinar.

Similar to the Loom example, this approach works because it uses the product to teach and get users to see the value as soon as possible.

Loom does it with all the videos that are actually created with Loom, and Demio offers an onboarding webinar made with their software.

8. Using a checklist for a frictionless first-time customer experience

Staring at a blank dashboard and not knowing what to do is a terrible first-time user experience.

And the best way to overcome this friction is with onboarding checklists.

Checklists lead users on a predetermined path to success, as it tells them what to do and how to use the product to achieve specific goals.

For example, here’s a checklist template example from Kommunicate:

9. Providing a great customer experience with interactive walkthroughs

Great onboarding and customer experience go hand-in-hand.

That’s why interactive walkthroughs are a powerful way to help new users engage with features and hand-hold them through the process.

Plus, it can work together with other tactics. For example, remember the onboarding checklist example from Kommunicate?

Each step is connected to a walkthrough that guides you on how to use a feature:

10. Embrace product-led and make it easy to get started with simplified signup forms

Friction equals bad customer experience.

And if you make it hard to even sign-up, customers will switch off to another brand.

Start by making the signup process as seamless as possible. This way, users get into the app sooner and experience the value faster (plus improve product-led onboarding).

For example, a CX trend right now is to include SSOs, as around 66% of SaaS businesses are starting to adopt SSO signups to make the process quick and more convenient.

And Loom is one of them.

It lets you register with either your email alone or SSOs with Google, Slack, and Apple, so you can choose what’s more convenient for you.

11. Suggesting upgrades in a contextual way that actually help drive customer satisfaction

People don’t like to be sold.

So if you want to maintain a great customer experience, the least you want to do is to push upsells randomly and at every opportunity.

Instead, do better, contextual upsells.

For this, use segmentation to personalize thoughtful messages and offer a plan your customer would truly consider helpful.

An excellent upselling example is how Loom only tries to offer an upgrade when you’re using their freemium plan to its maximum capacity:

12. Encourage engagement that drives repeated value through relevant customer interactions

You can’t sleep on customer experience even when the user is engaging with core features.

You must keep providing value consistently if you want them to convert into loyal advocates.

And a great way to offer value is with onboarding tooltips, as it introduces advanced features to the user gradually and in a non-intrusive way.

These tooltips work best when you show them contextually and when the user needs them. For example, see how Slack uses tooltips to introduce voice and video messages once you’ve set up your workspace:

13. Collecting customer feedback should go both ways in your customer experience strategy

We’ve said earlier that listening to feedback is huge for customer experience. But how do you build a customer feedback strategy?

Well, you need both active and passive feedback.

Active feedback is encouraged by the brand, while passive feedback is initiated by the user (think of tracking user-generated content like social comments, product reviews, forum threads, etc.).

However, you can also encourage passive feedback. You can, for instance, embed in-app surveys across your product’s UI to allow users to submit feedback while using your product.

An example of this is how Miro implements targeted surveys within their UI without disrupting the product experience:

14. Going the extra mile — show loyal customers that you care

Good CX meets expectations, but great CX always goes the extra mile.

One way is by showing appreciation to your most loyal customers by sending them a thoughtful gift that rewards their loyalty.

In this case, our team at Userpilot took “listening” too seriously and surprised one of our dream users with a t-shirt after having a call with him:

15. Memorable customer experiences even when users churn

No matter how good your CX is, churn is inevitable.

But your job doesn’t end there. You can still learn why the user is leaving, improve your product for the other users, and even reach out to ex-customers once the problem is fixed.

For this, you can trigger a cancellation flow when the user hits “cancel”. Ask what went wrong and offer multiple alternatives to churning (without making it hard to cancel).

Asana has an excellent cancellation example, as it makes it easy for you to select a predetermined answer and learn what didn’t work for you:

Conclusion

Optimizing your customer experience is not a task you accomplish by the end of the week.

It requires continuous development and iteration in order to kick off.

Hopefully, these customer experience examples were enough to inspire you to try some tactics.

So, why not try a Userpilot demo to apply these tactics easily and without coding?