How Customer Feedback Improves SaaS Platforms
Customer feedback is the driving force behind the success of SaaS platforms
SaaS continues to be an evolving and ever-growing space with new startups and competitors joining the market every year. With goals and aspirations to be the best SaaS platform, every SaaS company looks to provide the best product for their customers in a highly competitive market – which can be difficult with the continuously growing marketplace. In fact, a study from Price Intelligently found SaaS companies that started seven years ago faced an average of 2.6 competitors in their first year of business versus those that were founded only a couple of years ago were up against 9.7.
This growth in competition has raised the bar for the quality of service and products expected by customers around the world. In a highly competitive market, how do SaaS providers distinguish themselves from their competitors? The answer is very simple: the most successful SaaS companies give their audience exactly what they’re looking for and they accomplish this by asking customers for feedback and acting upon the responses.
The Importance of Customer Feedback
When the term “feedback” is thrown around, oftentimes it’s perceived with a negative connotation, however, in the world of SaaS, it adds immense value to teams to help drive decision-making and product initiatives. In this sense, “feedback” is the voice of the customer, and listening to that voice helps you understand how the relationship is going. Drawing insights from your customers about their pain points, likes and dislikes, problems they are solving, and much more, allows your business to achieve the following:
Improve Customer Onboarding Experiences
Once a buyer has converted into a customer, it's critical to keep them. Having a better understanding of the specific aspects of a product that are frustrating or provide joy for customers can be the difference between retaining or losing customers during their onboarding experience. Customers can become overwhelmed or frustrated during the onboarding process due to a lack of training, too much information, or simply not having a clear understanding of where to begin.
This is where feedback can come into play. Collecting surveys or using chat box features are excellent ways to drill down those specific areas of opportunities or pain points to better deliver information or enhance the experience. For example, a digital form solution provider might be able to identify they lack documentation on how to create a fillable PDF based on customer questions through a support chat portal. Alternatively, a data capture platform may find they require additional onboarding steps if their customers require hand-holding while getting their accounts set up.
Drive Product Improvements
As we touched on earlier, staying competitive in the SaaS industry is already a difficult task, but leveraging customer feedback is one of the best ways to maintain an edge over your competitors. Although you are the creator of the product, your customers are living in your platform every day utilizing it in ways you could have never imagined. Customer feedback request portals are a great way to encourage customer-driven product initiatives and allow for a centralized location to receive critical product feedback. As you work to grow your business, it’s important to listen to your customers and move in a direction that not only benefits their business but also allows them to mold your product into their everyday processes.
Reduce Churn
We aren’t always perfect and if you want to continue to evolve in a positive direction you don’t want to be either. There does come a time when a customer has a bad experience, but what you do during that critical moment is the driving factor that could prevent churn. When used effectively, customer feedback mobile forms or customer satisfaction surveys (CSAT) are a powerful tool to identify obstacles, understand customer needs or frustrations, and engage with customers earlier before they have an opportunity to churn.
Boost Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty
Leveraging peer-to-peer review sites is an invaluable asset to utilize during the buying process. In fact, 86% of software buyers use peer review sites when buying software and 92% of B2B buyers are more likely to purchase software after reading a trusted review! Encouraging customers to share their experiences in an online forum or share reviews on sites like G2 and Capterra helps you better understand current customer satisfaction levels and establishes customer loyalty, boosts brand credibility, and adds another layer of opportunity to publicly show appreciation for user feedback.
How to Know if Your SaaS Provider Utilizes Customer Feedback
With thousands of options available at your fingertips, it’s important to choose a SaaS provider that not only invites you to share your feedback but also follows up with action behind it. Unfortunately, action doesn’t just happen overnight but the decision to prioritize a recent suggestion just might. Here are a few things to consider when choosing your SaaS provider or what you should look for if you already have one:
Product Update Webinars: Product teams can share product updates in a quarterly or monthly webinar with customers who choose to attend and listen to the exciting new releases.
Review Sites: There are thousands of review sites available depending on your service or product. If you are on a review site, look to see if the SaaS provider is actively responding to positive and negative reviews. If the SaaS provider is ignoring negative reviews then there’s a good chance they’re avoiding their customers’ concerns.
Customer Testimonials: Testimonials can be leveraged to promote the customer's voice, provide opportunities to illustrate the action behind customer ideas, and be a resource for buyers during the buying process.
Social Media: Social media channels can be leveraged to answer questions, notify customers of outages, or promote testimonials.
Customer Feedback Portal: Allows customers from all over the world to share their ideas with the product team and to elevate concerns as well.
Emails: Emails can be sent to inactive users to get insights into why they aren’t using the product. Additionally, automated emails can be sent from 3rd party review sites for customers to leave a review to share with others.
About GoFormz
GoFormz is an operational data management solution that helps bring collected data into a single, actionable place. We believe that everyone should be able to fill out their forms online and deliver products and services that redefine how people and businesses collect and process information. Whether your team needs an electronic signature form, or requires surveys, GoFormz is the solution you’re looking for. Complete with an open API and multiple integration capabilities, you can gather and transfer data like never before.
