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customer retention

101 SaaS Customer Retention Strategies

Angela Stringfellow

Last updated on

Customer retention is a crucial function for SaaS companies, which survive on the monthly or yearly revenue generated by both new and existing customers. While customer acquisition can compensate for a poor customer retention rate to a degree, it’s much more costly to acquire a new customer than it is to retain an existing one. Thus, ramping up acquisition to compensate for poor customer retention can have a significant impact on profitability.

Customer retention also helps SaaS companies market their products and attract new customers. Over time, some customers become brand advocates who will provide testimonials and participate in case studies that can serve as social proof. Gathering regular customer feedback and using that feedback to improve your product, engaging users with push notifications and in-app notifications, and delivering ongoing value to your users are just a few of the many SaaS customer retention strategies you can implement. To make it easy to discover the best retention strategies for your business, we’ve rounded up 101 of the best SaaS customer retention strategies and tips from SaaS and customer retention experts in the following categories:

Developing Your SaaS Customer Retention Strategy

1. When customers cancel, ask them why. Understanding why your customers are churning is the first step in implementing an effective customer retention strategy. The easiest way to uncover the sources of customer churn is to ask your customers why they’re leaving. You can do this in a few ways, such as through exit surveys or asking customers to choose or enter a reason for cancelling on your unsubscribe form.

2. Define customer retention. While it seems straightforward enough, customer retention may not mean the same to one business as another. Determine the metric you’ll use to measure retention, such as the total number of registered users, paying users only, or active users.

3. Identify the metrics that you’ll track. Improving customer retention isn’t just about measuring the customer retention rate. Define the metrics that you’ll measure along the way, the role they play in retention, and how you’ll measure them.

4. Map the user journey. Mapping the user journey will prove valuable when developing your SaaS customer retention strategy. A user journey map identifies all potential touchpoints through which users engage with your app or interact with your brand, from their initial introduction to your business through their purchase and use of the product, customer support interactions, and eventually canceling. By identifying these touchpoints, you can better pinpoint where users are churning and take action to increase retention.

5. Develop a customer communication protocol. Staying in touch with your customers is one of the best ways to ensure your business remains top of mind. When crafting your SaaS customer retention strategy, consider how often your team should be in contact with customers, what channels they’ll use to do so, and how quickly they should follow up when a customer reaches out.

6. Establish how you’ll collect customer feedback. Another important component of your SaaS customer retention strategy is soliciting customer feedback and putting those insights to use to improve the customer experience. When and how you do so can have an impact on the response rate and the quality of responses you receive, so consider your options carefully and be prepared to iterate.

7. Set customer retention goals. You may have several customer retention goals for different user groups, such as one goal for new users and another for long-term users. You may also have different customer retention goals for different user segments.

8. Go beyond the customer retention rate metric. Your customer retention strategies are designed to improve your customer retention rate, but that’s not the only metric you should be measuring. Tracking metrics like customer satisfaction, NPS, customer acquisition cost, and customer lifetime value can help inform your decision-making and fine-tune your retention efforts.

9. Implement systems to identify customers at risk of churn. Identifying customers at risk of churn before it’s too late is the key to an effective customer retention strategy. That’s because you can be proactive to engage the customer and change their mind before they cancel or fail to renew.

10. Leverage smart payment tools to reduce involuntary churn. Smart payment tools help to reduce declined transactions with multi-currency payment, intelligent payment routing, and other features that minimize failed renewal payments.

11. Identify opportunities for cross-selling and up-selling. If your company creates multiple software products, cross-selling is one way to increase customer lifetime value and improve SaaS customer retention at the same time. Likewise, up-selling a customer on the next pricing tier or a longer contract helps to boost customer retention, as well. Not only do you need to know where these opportunities exist but also when to offer them for the best results. If they’re buying additional products or upgrading their plan, they’re not likely to cancel in the near future.

12. Identify your champions and monitor usage by other users. B2B SaaS companies typically have a champion within each client’s company. These champions are those who believe in the product and encourage their company to adopt it. But what happens when your champion leaves? If you monitor usage by other users within the company, you can identify other supporters and ensure that all users are getting value from your product to ensure retention even after your champion leaves.

13. Don’t focus solely on price. While some SaaS cancellations are due to cost, that’s not always the case. What matters most to customers is value, so craft your retention strategies around ensuring that every customer is getting the maximum value from your product.

14. Ensure that your customers are the right fit. Before developing a customer retention strategy to keep more of your customers on board, it’s important to evaluate whether your recently churned or most at-risk customers were ever a good fit for your business. Then, take steps to ensure that you determine if your prospects are a good fit during the sales process. That way, all your future customer retention efforts will be focused on your ideal customers.

15. Implement a complete notification system to manage push notifications, email notifications, and in-app notifications from one place. Notifications will play a significant role in your customer retention strategies, so get the right notification system in place before rolling out your retention efforts.

16. Close the feedback loop. You’ll gain some valuable insights from customers after implementing some common customer retention strategies. Close the feedback loop by passing customer feedback on to your product and marketing teams. They can then take steps to address common concerns with future releases or better communicate features, benefits, and use cases in marketing materials, both of which help to increase customer retention.

17. Take a long-term view of customer retention. Monthly recurring revenue (MRR) is an important SaaS metric, and stagnant MRR is alarming for many businesses. This leads to a focus on the immediate short-term, ensuring that MRR hits the target month after month. However, it’s vital to nurture every customer relationship throughout the entire customer lifetime.

18. Implement robust security. Today’s consumers (both the B2B and B2C variety) are increasingly aware of security threats and the need to protect their data. Having robust security measures in place can be a competitive advantage if your competitors are falling short.

Improving Customer Experience to Boost SaaS Customer Retention

19. Offer in-app onboarding for a seamless experience for new customers. In-app onboarding through tooltips, interactive walkthroughs, and pop-ups at key touchpoints help your users understand how to get the most from your product.

20. Stay on top of expiring credit cards. You have your customers’ credit card information on file for recurring payments, but those credit cards will eventually expire – typically, once every three years. According to Neil Patel, about 3% of your customers’ credit cards will expire each month, on average, or 36% over a year. Letting your customers know ahead of time that their card is expiring soon means they’re less likely to experience an unexpected service interruption should their next payment not go through.

21. Offer something they can’t get anywhere else. Even if your SaaS app has lots of similar competition, you can differentiate your brand by offering your customers something they can’t get anywhere else. Maybe that means an innovative feature, or it could be something as simple as valuable information that no one else is offering.

22. Track feature usage to inform your retention strategy. Keeping track of crucial metrics like how many features users use and leverage those insights to drive your customer retention strategy. As SmartKarrot explains, a customer who’s using just a few out of dozens of features may be at risk of churning, allowing you to take action to retain them. For example, you might reach out to those users with tutorials focused on the features they’re not taking advantage of or case studies that showcase how other customers are utilizing those features.

23. Use in-app notifications to announce new features. While in-app notifications shouldn’t be the only way you announce new features, it is one of the most important. That’s because these notifications reach users at the right time – when they’re already using the app – so they can explore the new capabilities right away.

24. Integrate with other products. When your product is integrated with multiple other products your customers are using, they’re less likely to churn because it’s more convenient for them to continue with their existing stack. “The strategy here is to make your product a critical part of the ecosystem of software products that your customers use so that they derive even more value out of your product,” explains Arpit Rai in an article published by Product Coalition. And the more value they get, the less likely they are to leave.

25. Provide customized onboarding processes for each customer persona. By tailoring the onboarding experience to customer personas, you’ll ensure that new customers are introduced to the features that they’ll use most, without getting overwhelmed by other features and capabilities that they don’t need.

26. Own your mistakes. Every business makes mistakes. The difference between a good experience and a bad experience is how the business handles the situation. Communicating clearly and honestly about your mistake as soon as possible after you’ve identified it—along with how you plan to rectify it—will help to establish transparency and trust.

27. Develop the right signup flow. Users don’t just churn after they’ve decided they no longer have a need for your product (or they found a better option elsewhere). They also churn during the signup process, before they ever actually use your product. One of the primary reasons for customer churn at this stage is a poorly designed signup flow. Follow best practices for creating a seamless signup experience and experiment to find the right type of signup flow for your business.

28. Implement gamification to make your product addictive. Gamification, or the application of gaming techniques in non-gaming scenarios, can be incorporated into practically any SaaS app. It can take the form of points systems, leaderboards, achievement systems that allow users to track their progress towards goals or milestones, and more.

29. Celebrate user successes. This is a psychological strategy that may seem silly on its face but actually has a big impact. Celebrate user successes with in-app congratulations messages, emails, or on-screen graphics after they’ve used a new feature for the first time or completed a task. Doing so gives users a sense of accomplishment and creates an emotional experience they’re more likely to remember.

30. Create a retention flow (or cancellation flow) to prevent cancellations. When users click a button indicating that they want to cancel their subscription, this behavior should trigger a cancellation flow. Use popups to offer them an exciting deal (such as a discount on a few months of the next-lowest pricing tier) that might just convince them to stay. If they proceed with the cancellation, ask them for feedback in another popup before they leave to gather valuable information on why they’re leaving.

31. Create a logical flow for user onboarding. If users must be familiar with core features before utilizing more advanced but related features, don’t provide tips and product tours about secondary features that they can’t yet understand. Instead, limit your onboarding flow to the core features and then gradually introduce users to more advanced features.

32. Don’t interrupt onboarding with activation emails. Requiring new users to activate their account by validating their email address can increase the percentage of signups who never even open your product. Instead, allow first-time users to experience your product and require them to confirm their account before their second use.

33. Give your brand a human element. Maintaining a human element in the digital customer experience helps to increase trust and makes your brand more relatable. Strive to make your chatbots more human-like, meet your customers where they are, and encourage employees to make valuable connections with customers.

34. Get the basics right first. According to PwC, customers value speed, convenience, friendliness, and consistency above all. Focusing on getting these basics right ensures a positive customer experience. Once you have the basics in place, then you can spend time and money on the extras like a cutting-edge, eye-catching design.

35. Provide regular training. Offering informative and regular customer training on new features and use cases establishes a feedback loop, offers value to your customers, and helps to address some customer support issues proactively.

36. Create online courses for various experience levels. Offering online courses designed to help customers master your product at every level of experience ensures that they’ll be able to use your app productively and gain value from it. You can even offer completion badges or certifications users can display on their profiles or websites to showcase their mastery, giving your brand a marketing boost at the same time.

37. Deliver on your promises on time. That means if you’ve released a project timeline for feature releases, you should stick to it. While there are sometimes unforeseen circumstances that make that impossible, being transparent and communicating the reasons for the delay will go a long way with users.

38. Share tips from top users. If you have a user community, your users might already be sharing tips with other customers there. However, not all customers will engage in a user community, so when good tips arise, you can ensure that all customers benefit from them by sharing them in your newsletter, on your company blog, or on social media (crediting the user for the tip, of course).

39. Help customers reach the “Aha” moment. The “Aha” moment is the moment when a customer realizes the full value of the product and starts to realize the various ways they can use it. The “Aha” moment might be different from one customer to the next, so it’s your job to nurture every customer gently through adoption to ensure that they hit the sweet spot in the user journey.

SaaS Customer Engagement Strategies to Improve Retention

40. Implement a notification system to boost customer engagement. Push notifications are a highly effective tool for boosting customer engagement for SaaS companies. Make them even more effective by implementing a notification inbox to make your messages “stick” with your users. With MagicBell, you can build a push notification system, complete with a notification inbox, in under an hour.

41. Deliver value with automatic emails or push notifications triggered by user behavior. For example, if a user uses a new feature, send a push notification or a triggered email with a link to an explainer video on how to use related capabilities within the app.

42. Engage with your customers on social media. Today’s customers expect a response if they ask a question or engage with your company on social media, so stay on top of your messages and comments across channels and respond in a timely manner (to both positive and negative questions, comments, and feedback). Social listening software (e.g., BrandMentions, Mention, Brandwatch, etc.) comes in handy here, allowing your team to monitor mentions across many social channels simultaneously.

43. Cultivate curiosity. Keeping your audience informed about upcoming events like webinars covering your latest release helps to keep your userbase buzzing. The key is to hype it up (but don’t overhype it) while giving away just enough information to make your audience feel like they’ll be missing out on something big if they don’t attend.

44. Create an exclusive community. Whether it’s a Facebook Group, LinkedIn Group, a forum or Reddit-style community, an exclusive customer community serves as a place for your users to gather and interact, share tips and best practices, and stay informed of the latest updates. It’s a highly effective strategy for improving SaaS customer retention, and it can also can help you identify and leverage your best brand advocates.

45. Educate your users with informative video tutorials. Offer interactive, guided video tours of your product to help new users master the features and functionality. The more they understand your product and how to get the most benefits from it, the more they’ll use it – and the more likely they’ll be to tell others about it.

46. Stay in touch with users (and improve several key marketing metrics) with a blog. A blog is a proven strategy for keeping your users informed about company news and updates, as well as tips and tricks to help them use your product and related industry insights. In fact, according to Demand Metric, 59% of B2B marketers say their company’s blog is its most effective marketing channel. What’s more, companies with blogs produce 67% more leads each month on average compared to those that don’t maintain a blog. Not convinced yet? The average company that maintains a blog also has 55% more visitors each month, 97% more inbound links, and 434% more indexed pages in search results, according to HubSpot.

47. Send triggered messages to decrease customer churn. Neil Patel suggests using automated and personalized messages triggered by user behaviors. For example, your data may reveal that customers who don’t use a product within a certain number of days after signing up are most likely to churn. You can leverage this data to trigger a personalized message that encourages those customers to log in and explore your product.

48. Reach out to churned users for 3-6 months after they cancel. Recently churned users are often easier to re-engage because they may not have found a replacement product yet. Of course, this isn’t as effective for users who churn because they no longer have a need for your product. But for those who churn for other reasons, reaching out with exciting product news and new features or irresistible incentives might just bring them back. These efforts should also make it easy for users to re-subscribe, such as a one-click renewal or re-activation button.

49. Provide detailed release notes with every release. Release notes help customers understand how to get the most out of your product, and in particular, the new or improved features included in the latest release. Release notes help to increase customer engagement and satisfaction while also demonstrating that you’re listening to what your customers want and delivering it.

50. Allow customers to suggest new features. A public feature request option gives customers a sense of ownership in your product.

51. Allow customers to vote on feature requests. Allowing voting on feature requests provides you with valuable insight to determine which features matter most to your customers so you can prioritize them on your product roadmap.

52. Boost engagement with a carefully crafted new feature launch plan and announcement. You’ll want to collaborate with your marketing team to ensure consistent messaging and plan how to spread the word about your latest features.

53. Implement in-app engagement to make users aware of the latest features and capabilities. In-app announcements grab users’ attention at the right moment to introduce them to new features right when they need them.

54. If you have a free tier, continuously try to convince free-tier users to upgrade. However, avoid being annoying to the point where they’ll close their account even though they weren’t paying for your product in the first place. Instead, try a mix of strategies over time to convince them to give a paid tier a try.

55. Increase feature adoption and engagement with product marketing. This means marketing your new features through your newsletter, on social media, your company blog, guest blog posts, podcast, and other channels. Doing so expands your reach and encourages customers to try out the latest features, which gets them engaged with your app and helps to boost customer retention.

56. Implement customer advisory boards. These boards can be composed of power users or a sampling of beginner to expert users for a broader range of insights. Hold regular customer advisory board meetings to gather comments and feedback on your product roadmap, voice issues and concerns, and suggest solutions and ideas.

57. Host in-person and virtual events. Hosting events provides customers with the opportunity to network with and learn from other users, fostering a strong sense of community. In-person events are great for face-to-face interactions, but virtual events enable customers to attend from around the globe. Plus, virtual events are more practical to implement in the COVID-19 era.

58. Get buy-in across the department or company. While there may be one champion of your product who introduces it to their team, it’s important to gain buy-in from other stakeholders beyond your original supporter. If it’s a large account, you might dedicate an account manager to the client to ensure all users are satisfied.

59. Leverage social proof. Social proof helps to build trust. Develop case studies about how your product has helped your most successful customers, ask customers for testimonials, and share customer stories.

60. Maintain a customer communication calendar. A customer communication calendar is a chart designed to track the last time each customer interacted with your brand. By alerting you when customers haven’t reached out in a pre-determined number of days, customer communication calendars help you stay on top of customer engagement.

61. Send progress reports or milestone notifications. These notifications provide users with statistics about their usage, which can help them understand the value they’re getting from your product. They also have the psychological effect of enticing customers to come back to continue their progress or avoid breaking a usage streak.

Optimizing Pricing and Features to Increase Customer Retention

62. Price your product right. Pricing can play a big role in customer retention. While you can differentiate your brand by offering greater value than your competitors, optimized pricing can help you boost customer loyalty, too. A value-based pricing strategy ensures that customers receive greater value on higher-priced subscription tiers. The additional value they receive should be proportionate to the increased cost from one tier to the next.

63. Make it scalable. Scalability is obviously vital for any SaaS business, but it should be scalable for your customers, too. Make it easy for users to upgrade to higher-priced tiers when they need more storage or functionality.

64. Make downgrading easy, but not too easy. It should also be easy for users to downgrade to lower-priced tiers to increase your odds of keeping customers for less monthly recurring revenue vs. losing them altogether. However, it’s a good idea to require users to contact your team to downgrade. This provides an opportunity to find out why they’re downgrading and what you can improve to prevent others from doing the same.

65. Allow users to pause subscriptions. When faced with a choice of cancelling a SaaS subscription or pausing it when they need to save money or won’t have a need for the product for a few months, 44 percent of customers would opt to pause.

66. Encourage users to purchase annual subscriptions. When on a month-to-month subscription, users may be more likely to cancel to eliminate the monthly expense from their budget. If they’re on an annual subscription, on the other hand, they’ve already paid for the year. By the time they’re up for renewal, they may have changed their mind and decide to continue with their subscription. Offering discounts on annual subscriptions is a powerful motivator for many users.

67. Offer users the opportunity to participate as a beta tester. This is an incentive that’s a win-win, giving the user a chance to take advantage of the newest features or newest versions before they’re rolled out to all users. Plus, beta testers offer valuable feedback on those new features so you can ensure they’re performing optimally when they’re fully released.

68. Consider a captive pricing strategy if it’s right for your business. In a captive pricing strategy, the base product with core features is free or low-cost, which gets customers on board. Then, you can upsell access to additional features, storage, more team seats, and other perks. This strategy also enables you to retain some customers who would otherwise churn, as they have the option to downgrade to the free or lowest-cost base plan without canceling their subscription altogether—and that means you have more opportunities to earn back their business.

69. Release updates and new features regularly. What do customers need from your product? What can they get from a competitor that they can’t get from you? The answers to these questions will help inform your product roadmap so your next release caters precisely to what your customers need most.

70. When users drop off before fully implementing a new feature, reach out to find out why. This doesn’t necessarily mean that customers are unsubscribing, but they are failing to successfully use a new feature. Reaching out to these users to find out why they’re stuck allows you to offer support to help them work through the problem. It also helps you identify potential design flaws or interface shortcomings that you can improve to make the feature easier to access, use and understand.

71. Use value metrics in your pricing strategy. If your SaaS pricing strategy is based on features or commodities (such as storage) that aren’t highly valued by customers, your users might have the perception that they’re paying for something they don’t need. On the other hand, basing your pricing strategy on what your customers value most will help to improve retention by increasing users’ value perception. Your pricing strategy must align with the value users get from your product.

72. Use a multi-dimensional pricing model. Basing pricing based on value metrics is one thing, but using a single dimension, such as 100 transactions per month, might fall short of maximizing your revenue. A multi-dimensional pricing model incorporates multiple value metrics into pricing tiers, creating multiple scenarios in which users will upgrade to a higher price tier while still getting value from your product. If your pricing tiers are based on the number of transactions and the number of documents, for example, users will upgrade when they require more than the upper limit of either dimension.

73. Make your product convenient to use. The more hurdles customers have to jump through to access the features they need, the more likely they are to churn. Ensuring that your app is easy and convenient to use increases customer engagement with your app and boosts customer retention.

Using Incentives to Boost SaaS Customer Retention

74. Offer random rewards. Periodically offering unexpected rewards adds an element of surprise, helping to improve customer satisfaction. Consider an unexpected storage increase, additional features, or a discount for being a loyal customer.

75. Craft team incentives around customer retention. Don’t just incentivize your customers to stay; aligning team incentives with customer retention can have a big impact, too. In fact, customers switching to competitors costs businesses an estimated $1.6 trillion globally. Give your team members a reason to go above and beyond to ensure customer satisfaction rather than focusing solely on new customer acquisition.

76. Create a referral program. Not only are referred leads more likely to convert to paying customers, but they’re also more likely to stick around – about 37% more likely. An added bonus is that a referral program can significantly reduce your customer acquisition cost (CAC).

77. Develop a customer loyalty program. Reward your most loyal customers with incentives that will keep them coming back for renewal after renewal. Not only do loyalty programs help to retain those who earn the incentives, but it also shows your entire customer base that you value your customer relationships, which helps to boost retention across the board.

78. Develop a customer advocacy program. According to Usersnap, customer advocates are two to three times more effective at selling your product than the typical sales rep, and customers are more likely to trust word-of-mouth recommendations from trusted family and friends than typical brand messaging or advertising. So, identify your customer advocates and offer incentives for them to brag about your product, such as an account credit or discount.

79. Recognize power users. These types of programs are a bit different from loyalty programs in that there’s no expectation of a reward. Instead, users are surprised when they’re rewarded with a VIP badge or other status that makes them feel like they’re part of an exclusive club. This status may also entitle users to early access to new releases, discounts, or other perks.

80. Surprise loyal customers with a reward. Send a thank you card or a small gift to your loyal customers to thank them for their business.

Improving SaaS Customer Retention with Excellent Customer Support

81. Set realistic customer expectations. It’s always better to under-promise and over-deliver than to under-deliver and fail to meet your customers’ expectations. Promise what you know you can make good on, and then make every effort to go above and beyond.

82. Host informative webinars regularly. Customers love webinars that show them how to get more value from your product. In fact, Wistia reported in September 2020 that business video consumption was up 120%, year-over-year, since March 2020, driven in part by the COVID-19 pandemic and the proliferation of remote work. Launched a new feature? Host a webinar talking users through how to use it or how to optimize it while sharing your screen and demonstrating the process step-by-step. All-in-one webinar platforms with features like screen-sharing functionality, analytics, and tools to communicate with attendees make it possible to host high-quality webinars for your users, even on a tight budget.

83. Invest in customer success. Your customers’ success depends on how well their interactions with your business help them achieve their desired outcomes. Communicating with customers across channels, engaging them at the right moments in non-disruptive ways, and delivering ongoing value are all key components in ensuring customer success.

84. Offer one-on-one customer support with in-app chat. It may sound labor-intensive, and it can be. Leveraging a chatbot that can route inquiries to live agents only when pre-existing information can’t adequately resolve the user’s issue can reduce the time your live agents spend interacting with individual users while still offering a faster time to resolution for many customer inquiries. Plus, in-app chat is easy and intuitive for customers to use, and they don’t have to leave the app to do so.

85. Provide omnichannel customer support. Omnichannel customer support enables customers to navigate seamlessly between channels and pick up where they left off. In other words, they can start a conversation with your customer support team through Facebook Messenger and switch to email or phone without having to repeat their concerns each time they connect with a customer support rep.

86. Provide self-service resources. 81% of users attempt to resolve their own issues before contacting customer support, so make it easy to find answers to common questions. Implement self-service options such as a knowledge base, chatbots, and interactive tutorials and walk-throughs to give customers the tools they need to resolve issues and questions.

87. Make it easy to contact a live customer support rep. In addition to providing self-service options, you should also make it easy for customers to get in touch with your customer support team when they’re using those options. For instance, a live chat option in your knowledge base or in-app communication allows customers to quickly reach out to your team when they need assistance from a live agent.

88. Use social listening for customer service. With social listening, you’ll track conversations about and mentions of your brand, your product or service, and your industry to engage with customers across social media. Not only does this allow you to gain insights into the overall sentiment about your business and customers’ primary pain points, but it also enables you to respond to negative feedback proactively and turn negative experiences into positive ones.

89. Respond promptly to customers who reach out on social media. The average response time by businesses on social media is 157 minutes—meaning there’s ample opportunity to make a big impact by responding promptly to customer inquiries and mentions.

90. Maintain an easily accessible change log to keep customers updated. When customers login to your app, how easy is it for them to determine what’s new? If they’re confronted with an unfamiliar UI, a change log makes it easy for them to find out what features and changes have been implemented most recently.

91. Use visual elements to demonstrate new features in action. Visual elements, such as animated GIFs, can help users understand how to use your newest product features without having to track down more information in your knowledge base or FAQs.

92. Continuously update knowledge bases and other self-service portals. Say you haven’t used visual elements in your change log to demonstrate how to use new features. If your users are confused, they might seek out more information from your knowledge base. And if you haven’t yet populated your knowledge base and other self-service portals with relevant knowledge, your users will end up frustrated. Ensuring your FAQs, knowledge base, and other documentation are comprehensive and up to date with information on the latest features helps to ensure a positive user experience.

93. Ensure your knowledge base is easy to navigate. Nothing is worse than a knowledge base that has hundreds (or even thousands) of in-depth information on every facet of a product that’s impossible to navigate. What’s the point in having all that information if your users can’t find it? That’s why it’s important to create a logical structure and hierarchy for your knowledge base with search functionality to help users quickly find the information they need.

94. Create easy-to-follow help articles. Your knowledge base articles should be easy to follow, without too much jargon that some users may not understand. If you do introduce new terms, define them. It’s also a good idea to break up large blocks of text with subheadings, graphics that support the content, and bullet points for skimmability.

95. Empower employees to provide excellent customer service. Arm your employees with the tools they need to provide prompt, friendly, and reliable service when customers need support.

96. Implement scalable customer service. Create processes to seamlessly scale customer support as your business grows.

97. Break down silos to collaborate on customer data. Today’s SaaS businesses must provide exceptional customer service to compete. Integrating service, sales, marketing, and IT functions to enable these teams to collaborate on customer data and build comprehensive customer profiles is the building block to truly personalized customer service.

98. Identify customers who contact customer support most often. Then, have an experienced customer support representative reach out to learn about their challenges and offer resources and solutions. Take a proactive approach to addressing the needs of customers who are frequent support callers, and they’ll be more likely to stay.

99. Meet your customers where they are. Offering easily accessible customer support through the channels your customers prefer allows customers to get their problems resolved quickly without disrupting their usual routine.

100. Provide in-app support. This ensures that your users can contact support whenever they need it, at the moment an issue arises.

101. Create a dedicated retention team. By having a team of specialists dedicated to customer retention, you can assign a dedicated retention specialist to high-ticket clients to ensure that they’re getting the most value from your product.
Notifications play a central role in SaaS customer retention. With MagicBell, SaaS companies can implement a complete notification system and launch a multi-channel notification strategy in days, rather than months—and without breaking a sweat.