CX Strategy for SaaS: An Essential Guide [+Best Practices]

Searching for a customer experience (CX) strategy to set you apart from the competition?

A CX strategy should encompass every interaction and engagement layer between your customers and your SaaS product. You should use it to meet and exceed customer expectations to increase customer satisfaction and retention and boost revenue growth.

This article guides you to make an excellent CX strategy with best practices and tips.

Let’s start!

What is a customer experience (CX) strategy?

A customer experience (CX) strategy is a company’s plans and practices to deliver positive customer experiences at every touchpoint throughout the customer journey.

How to build a CX strategy?

Let’s see how you can build an effective CX strategy.

Start with your goals

Goals give you direction and clarity on the actions you need to take to achieve success. You can start by setting clear customer experience management goals using the SMART framework.

The SMART acronym includes 5 essential criteria:

• Specific: You should be specific about your CX objectives – be it improving the engagement metrics or eliminating most pain points.
• Measurable: Your goals should let you track the progress toward set goals.
• Attainable: The goals should be achievable while considering your business’ present condition, not some lofty ones.
• Relevant: Your goals need to be relevant and result-oriented if you want to be successful. You can’t just want to increase the retention rate by 200% within a week.
• Time-bound: The goals should come with an approximate time of when you’ll complete them. You should also be specific on the deadline to bring out the maximum effort from your employees.

Define your customer personas

Defining your customer personas is about creating a meaningful, value-driven representation of your ideal users for each product use case. It brings life into the customer data and transforms abstract data into relatable human figures.

You should identify the commonalities among customers to understand them better. Besides determining customer goals, pain points, and motivations, you also need to consider their context of use for your product.

Humanize the customer personas and make them feel less like abstract data points and more like real people with real challenges and needs.

Create customer empathy maps

An empathy map consists of a square with four quadrants and the user in the center. The four quadrants respectively capture what the user says, thinks, feels, and does.

You need to identify the customer personnel you want to understand and empathize with. If you have multiple personas, create a separate empathy map for each. Then you must collect customer feedback to get the necessary details for your empathy map.

It’s critical that you analyze the collected feedback data and pay attention to customers’ emotions, needs, motivations, and pain points. Then you can create the customer empathy maps by inputting the data into the quadrant it fits. You should also continuously iterate and refine the map as you gain more insights into your users.

Build a customer journey map

A customer journey map visually illustrates the various touchpoints and interactions a customer has with your product. It showcases customers’ steps, emotions, and perceptions while they engage with the product.

To build customer journey maps, you need to identify the important touchpoints and milestones for customers. After that, map out the customer journeys for each touchpoint by keeping each persona’s needs in mind. You can use these maps to develop your CX strategy and deliver great customer experiences.

Offer personalized experiences across the customer journey

Personalization involves tailoring your customer experience based on customer personas’ preferences, touchpoints, and interactions. These personalized experiences create a deeper connection with your customers and greater loyalty.

You should collect user data via the welcome surveys to offer personalization across the customer journey. You also need to further optimize it by using product analytics as users interact with your products. Then use this data to tailor your customer interactions based on their needs and preferences.

The main goal should be to trigger a personalized flow when users reach a specific milestone. For example, you may trigger a custom onboarding flow when new customers complete their account setup and give the data.

A/B test and optimize your CX strategy

A/B testing is a powerful and actionable method to ensure your CX strategy’s effectiveness. You can apply your CX strategy to a subset of your audience and see if it works for them.

Userpilot allows you to perform A/B tests and make data-driven decisions for CX strategy optimization. It lets you check if implementing something works better than not implementing it. For example, you can measure whether users seeing an onboarding checklist have better adoption rates than users who don’t.

Best practices for a successful customer experience strategy

We’ll now go through some of the best practices for a successful CX strategy.

Use welcome surveys to understand customer expectations and needs

Including a welcome survey in the signup flow is a good way to get information about your customers’ expectations and needs. You can ask users questions about their roles, JTBDs (jobs to be done), etc. The questions can also ask customers about their expectations for your product.

This welcome survey data at this stage lets you understand customer expectations and needs from the beginning. Then you can improve your customer journey map outlines by tailoring them to your customer’s specific needs and expectations.

Trigger personalized in-app experiences using segmentation

User segmentation can help you provide customers with the right personalized in-app experiences at the right time. At first, you need to identify and create user segments using various contributing conditions, like – user ID, jobs to be done (JBTDs), in-app behavior, customer satisfaction score, etc.

You should then choose the right triggers for your personalized in-app experiences by identifying events or actions for each segment. For example, you can make a segment with the new signups that are underusing important features. You can trigger in-app guidance to encourage interaction with the features and drive feature adoption.

Offer self-service support with an in-app resource center

Customers have different learning preferences – some prefer learning by reading the documentation, while others favor watching videos. Providing various self-service options with an in-app resource center is a great way to cater to customers’ multiple preferences.

Your customer success team should work closely with the product and content teams to include self-training materials, knowledge base, product documentation, etc., in the resource center. The materials should also come in various formats so that customers can use the one they want.

It helps customers find solutions to their problems quickly and easily without waiting for customer support. As a result, customers get an enhanced customer experience while saving time and not becoming frustrated.

Use AI-powered chatbots for customer support automation

AI-powered chatbots offer an interactive approach to support customers, especially when customer support is unavailable. They can automate customer support tasks by answering frequently asked questions, providing product information, and resolving simple issues.

You can also use AI chatbots in onboarding your new users. They can answer any question about a feature or product, provide instructions, and help users use your product.

Collect customer feedback data at various touchpoints

In-app surveys are an effective way to collect customer feedback data because they allow you to gather real-time insights. It shows customers that you value their opinions and want to provide them with the best possible customer experience.

You should trigger in-app surveys based on customer interactions to get the most accurate feedback. For example, a customer has recently used the resource center. Then you can trigger a survey that asks the customer about their experience with the center and whether they found the information they needed.

Close the feedback loop

Closing the feedback loop is a crucial component of a successful CX strategy. It involves taking action by addressing user feedback, improving the customer experience, and showing that you value their opinions.

You should prioritize feedback data based on urgency and impact and create an action plan for addressing it. A structured approach ensures you act on the feedback data promptly and effectively.

It’s also critical to communicate with customers about your actions based on their feedback. You can provide regular updates on the progress of specific issues and show customers that you value their feedback to increase customer retention.

Analyze customer behavior and remove friction

Analyzing customer behavior to identify and remove friction is essential for an effective CX strategy. A combination of product analytics, heat maps, and session recordings will help you uncover areas of friction to start working on them.

With product analytics, you’ll better understand where your users get stuck and what features your users interact with most. Moreover, heatmaps and session recordings offer visual insights into your customers’ interaction with the product.

You should use funnel analysis to understand how users reach a specific milestone, such as signing up for a trial or completing a purchase. It’ll help you identify drop-offs and other areas where users may be experiencing friction and take action based on this information to improve customer experience.

Collaborate with the customer support team to understand where users struggle

Collaborating with the customer support teams is crucial to improve your CX strategy by truly understanding customers’ pain points. Your customer support teams are the frontline warriors who can provide firsthand knowledge about the common issues you haven’t addressed.

With the customer service teams’ expertise, you can uncover hidden patterns, recurring problems, or gaps in your product that need attention. As a result, you can make informed decisions and drive product improvements by using this goldmine of insights from the CS team.

Key metrics for measuring customer experience efforts

Measuring your CX strategy’s success is necessary to ensure that you meet customer needs and improve their overall experience. You should use the following key metrics to do that:

• Net Promoter Score: Measures customer loyalty and gauges how likely customers are to recommend your product to others. Userpilot’s NPS ability lets you measure and analyze NPS responses with advanced features like user segmentation, analytics dashboard, etc.
• Customer Satisfaction Score: Measures how satisfied customers are with your product to help you identify where improvements are necessary to enhance the customer experience.
• Customer Effort Score: Measures how much effort your customers need to put into using your features or products.

Conclusion

Implementing a robust CX strategy is critical to thriving in today’s competitive SaaS industry. We hope you can prioritize customer experience with the best practices we’ve discussed to build lasting relationships and foster loyalty.

Want to get started with a CX strategy? Get a Userpilot Demo and see how you can use it to improve your customer experience.