How To Make An Enterprise SaaS Customer-Centric In 2024?

Customer-centric growth means your actions are around what is best for your customer. It is not that you will not pay attention to the product but focus on delivering as much value to your customer's requirements. A positive customer experience can lower the maintenance cost for the existing customer by as high as 33%.

Customer-centricity in enterprise SaaS is crucial for the growth of a long-lasting and sustainable organizational culture with the qualities or features to fundamentally keep the right customer at the center of every action.

The customer-oriented businesses commonly use the concept of customer-centricity. However, most companies don't understand what it means to have a customer-centricity in their overall strategy, where most customer journey mapping happens only from the perspective of business goals.

SaaS enterprise businesses achieve growth with a well-designed customer success strategy. The approach to encouraging a corporate customer culture using customer experience and interactions enhances customer value, experience, and lifecycle.

What Does It Mean To Be Customer-Centric?

A customer-centric organization understands customers' wants, needs, and expectations and aims to deliver an unmatched customer experience prioritizing the consumers' point of view.

Customer-centric is often confused with customer-focused. There's a big difference between the two.

Customer-focused is a comprehensive idea of companies to treat their customers right and offer a consistently constructive and relevant experience. However, customer-centric focuses on the customer's lifetime value using segmentation to align and focus the enterprise on a specific targeted high-value customer segment to drive profit.

Customer-centricity helps SaaS enterprises to generate greater profits, increase employee engagement, and more satisfied customers. It helps create resilience, sustainability, and alignment with your business goals.

Why Is Customer-Centricity Important For Saas Enterprise?

Enterprise SaaS businesses have reconstructed their business model that meets the needs of their customers with a customer-centric approach.

Customer-centricity requires an approach where customers are an integral part of the business; basing their decisions on customer expectations drives customer satisfaction and loyalty. It also requires taking responsibility and ownership to move. It is essential to create culture-defining customer-centric KPIs with the help of a single source of truth, where customers can easily add, track, and look at the progress of the requested use cases.

SaaS enterprises commit to listening to their requirements and installing a culture and infrastructure that supports them. It is crucial for companies to understand the consumers' changing needs and wants to achieve customer-centricity to survive and even thrive in these turbulent times.

Customer centricity plays a crucial role in the success of a SaaS enterprise business. Companies make decisions based on customer needs and ensure their products and services fill all the market gaps to secure a higher conversion rate. It helps organizations become unstoppable by delivering customers genuine value.

What Are The Factors Involved In Establishing Customer-Centricity?

SaaS enterprises with a customer-centric approach to their organization not only want to sell their product to customers but also want them to engage with it as much as receive value from it and keep renewing their subscriptions every month or year.

Customer Lifecycle:

SaaS enterprises must keep up with the customers throughout their Customer lifecycle to have a long-lasting and sustainable relationship with customers. The customer lifecycle refers to the customer's journey and the various stages a consumer goes through before, during, and after completing the transaction.

SaaS enterprises divide the customer lifecycle into three stages; acquisition, engagement, and retention of your customers.

Acquisition

The first stage starts with attracting customers, then engaging them enough to answer their questions and build trust to close the sales. Acquisition of new customers requires generating awareness through effective and informative SEO content with community building. Also, using paid ads and SEO to its best potential, mixing it well with the Company goals and KPIs, optimizing for the lowest possible cost-per-conversion for acquiring the best quality leads.

Engagement

SaaS enterprises have a subscription business model, which makes it hard to retain customers and stop them from moving on to your competitors. It is crucial to ensure you provide outreach, education, and resources to prevent common roadblocks that lead customers to churn. The approach to engaging with customers might defer from what customer phase they are in between initial onboarding and the ongoing relationship with the existing customer.

Retention

Customer Retention is the main goal for every organization to retain its best customers for long-term relationships, understanding their concerns while making them feel valued.

Companies must follow up with customers using your product to check with them about any obstacle or issue they face while using the products and provide solutions to keep renewing their subscriptions. These happy customers are a source of growth for your company, who tell their friends and colleagues about your product through word-of-mouth marketing, writing customer reviews, and serving as testimonials and case studies. Companies also use approaches like upselling and cross-selling for customer retention and expansion.

Customer Experience:

Customer experience is about each customer's perception of your company, brand, and product. SaaS companies are embracing a customer-centric strategy and talking about optimizing the customer experience across the customer journey with a good CX design.

A good customer experience ensures customer satisfaction and brand recall is strong with the product.  

All customer touchpoints, interactions, and engagement combined for an overall customer experience make the perception of a company.

• A touch point is when customers find you through ads or while scrolling on social media or get exposed to your product and service.
• An interaction is a two-way communication that your customers have with you when they sign-up and inquire as they like your product and check if it fits as a solution to their problem.
• An engagement is a commitment or agreement to act with your product or service. It is customers who realize that your product meets their requirements they agree to purchase and go forward with the onboarding.

Experience is the perception that a customer has of your company or product. All customer touchpoints, interactions, and engagement combined for an overall customer experience make the perception of a company.

Customer Value:

Customer lifetime value is an estimated prediction of the net profit that the business attributed over the whole period of the relationship with a customer. Higher customer retention and lower customer churn rates help businesses maximize their customer's lifetime value. Customer lifetime value (CLV) is a key SaaS metric that tells you how much revenue a typical customer will bring in during their relationship with your company.

The foundation of subscription-based business models is understanding customer lifetime value to evaluate the potential success of a SaaS business. The continuation of the annual subscription is what brings revenue for SaaS companies. SaaS enterprise businesses need to lower the cost of acquisition than the cost of maintaining the existing customers to increase customers' lifetime value.

How Does The Transition From Product-Centricity To Customer-Centricity Benefit A Company?

If a SaaS business wants to be successful, it must be able to satisfy customers, a customer that wants their needs to be satisfied. Customer-centricity means understanding customer needs and pain points while providing solutions and remembering their preferences.

A product-centric approach starts with having quality products and services that respond to customer needs and then getting as many customers as possible to provide solutions to customers with these needs. It aims to improve the product and make it speak for itself while providing customers with constant updates. A SaaS enterprise measures the success of a product-centric approach by the number of customers reached. It also represents your company's market share.

A customer-centric approach starts with the individual customer and provides solutions for all the requirements customers might need to solve their problems. It aims to have the best relationship with the customer base to increase sales and retain customers by reducing the churn rate, increasing the user retention rate, and having good customer service.

Companies measure the success of a customer-centric approach by the customer lifetime value, which shows the share each customer contributes.

Don Peppers, a customer experience expert, explained the difference between customer-centricity and product-centricity and that the financial objectives of a company that competes for both dimensions differ.

A product-centric way focuses on optimizing the value created by each product, while customer-centricity focuses on optimizing the value created by each customer.

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Top 5 Effective Strategies To Build Customer-Centricity For B2B Saas Businesses?

Customer-centric organizations need to know who their customers are, what they want, their preferences, and their experiences throughout their customer journey.

Let's dive deep into the strategies that will help you build a customer-centric organization.

1. Make A Visible Customer Journey.

A platform that gives you visibility into the individual customer journey is the necessity of the hour. It takes immense organization to make every customer segment the subject of personalized communication.

You will have all the details possible to build a healthier and more robust relationship with your customers, such as their usage rate, health score, and customer status. These insights will help your team quickly and smoothly access all the information on any customer at any time and offer actionable recommendations to avoid churn. It will save your customer Success team's time and increase your enterprise's ROI.

2. Personalized Communication Channels.

Identifying patterns and threads of customer interactions and understanding them helps your team strategies ways to make your organization customer-centric.

Customers prefer to interact with businesses capable of solving their specific pain points when they face obstacles while using your product instead of being spammed with irrelevant messages about the benefits of one product or another. In 2021, two-thirds of B2B buyers chose either remote human interactions or digital self-service during the purchasing process.

Customers want to independently solve their problems or receive a customized solution directly to address their needs and interests without beating around the bush to provide value to the customer.

3. Incorporate Customer-Centricity Into The Overall Company Strategy.

Companies need to standardize the insights from customer-facing conversations across the company to build a customer-centric organization and avoid data loss due to data sharing through silos, where each team is equally involved and aware of customer needs.

Companies need seamless workflows that improve cross-functional collaboration and facilitate the analysis of customer data with the help of a good platform. It must provide a summary of all the records of customer conversations across all interaction points to make it easy for all teams to retrieve actionable insights from those conversations.

4. Provide An Agile Customer Experience

SaaS companies that provide a customer-centric user experience have to

remain agile with changing buyer behavior to respond to any of these changes if it intends to put customer-centricity at the heart of its values.

Agility in customer experience allows your organization to thrive by emphasizing the customer throughout every touchpoint of the customer journey for the employee to work with the same common goal in mind.

5. Always Deliver Extra Value

A value-driven approach helps you attract loyal and happy clients for customer success. It will help you differentiate your brand from the competition and focus on delivering an exceptional customer experience.

Your customer onboarding strategy must include educational elements and easy access to expert guidance, more than just a tutorial showing new customers around your software. It will give your customers an understanding of the value they're getting from their investment and how they can receive more.

Wrap Up:

Customer centricity is an approach to doing business that focuses on creating positive customer experiences. SaaS enterprise businesses keep customers as the ultimate beneficiaries who receive the values that provide solutions by maintaining portfolio value streams, collaboration, and commitments.

Customer-centricity is crucial for companies to achieve unprecedented growth. It is a core value that any organization needs to align at the top level with the right strategies in mind to help enhance the customer experience.

You need to invest in the right tool, like CogniSaaS, to provide visibility, accountability, and collaboration opportunities to build a customer-centric organization.