75 Actionable Insights and Resources To Customer Success for SaaS Startups

2. by Lincoln Murphy

3. These lists don’t tell you is that the value chain for a customer to successfully use your product is long and keeping them engaged is a process filled with a combination of

5. The SaaS Customer Success Lifecycle

7. 1 Customer Development

8. The Expert Tip • Strategy • Food for Thought • Basics Ray Wu’s 3 step guide on how to do Customer Development right. 13 Quora answers on How to design an effective Survey for Customer Development This list by KISSmetrics has over 26 awesome resources to help you start interviewing your customers and building your product. Ash Maurya On how we need to rethink Customer Development for startups and web apps.

9. Survey.io lets you create surveys and send them by email to your prospects. Pricing: Gated. Appears once you provide details of your campaign. Helprace lets you design customer surveys to reach out to potential customers and understand their needs. Pricing: All plans come with Ticketing support + knowledge base. Free Forever – 3 Agents | Targeted: $9 agent/mo | All-In: $18 Everything

10. 2 Customer Acquisition

11. The Expert Tip • Core Metrics • Strategy • Food for Thought A very in-depth look at the customer acquisition process Consult the ‘Ultimate SaaS Pricing Guide‘ to improve an important part of your product marketing The core metrics you need to track to acquire customers Rafi Choudhury explains the difference between hiring a growth hacker and a digital marketer

12. Videoscribe Helps you create simple white board ‘explainer’ videos to talk about your product. Discounts for registered charities. Pricing: Monthly $12 Billed annually at $144 or Monthly $29 Quickmail.io Lets you follow up on your email outreach. You can also track open and reply rates, automate mails and follow ups and stop follow ups on reply, A/B test mails Pricing: Free Trial: 14 days. No credit card required. Monthly: $49 (mail 200 prospects/day) | $69 (mail 500 prospects/day) KickoffLabs A useful tool to create landing page campaigns, lead capture forms, social referrals and viral campaigns. Pricing: All plans offer unlimited landing pages, a/b testing and launch templates. Business $104/mo | Premium $48/mo | Starter $27/mo.

13. 3 Sales Process Engagement

14. The Expert Tip • Strategy • Food for Thought Every customer starts out as a prospect that is costing your company money A great visual representation of the Sales Process Choices, choices. Your prospect usually has plenty. How do you help them choose you?

15. Clearbit helps you narrow down your research on customers, verify leads and gain insights to build a strong customer base. Saves a ton of time for small growth teams. Pricing: Plans start at $99 a month. Close.io is an alternative to Salesforce that has a beautiful sales workflow and promises to help you close more deals and get more sales. Pricing: Free 14 day trial / no credit card required | Basic: $65 (Unlimited Opportunities) | Professional: $110 Basic Pipedrive: “A sales CRM for small teams with big ambitions” Made by salespeople. I love their simple pricing. Pricing: Simple pricing for busy people. $12 / user / month No contracts No account limits No hidden fees No charge for support, API key. No credit card required for 30-day trial”

16. 4 Billing and Payment

17. The Expert Tip • Strategy A list of tips to keep in mind when planning a billing page. This can help you offer customers an improved and enjoyable recurring billing experience Neil Patel shares strategies on creating recurring billing

18. Hiveageis a simple, powerful online billing tool for freelancers and small businesses. Their Free Plan is flexible and useful. Pricing: Free – Unlimited Clients & Invoices | Paid plans from $6.95/mo Billing Orchard is a great tool to create and manage recurring billing and quickbooks. Pricing: Try their Free 15 Day Trial (No credit card required) Their charged plans are OAK –$19.95/month and ORCHARD – $29.95/month. Chargebeepromises to handle your Billing and Invoicing, Payments and Subscriptions by automating processes that slow you down like dunning and tax compliance checks. They also have a great free plan for small startups for upto $50K revenue. Pricing: Starts at $99/mo, upto $399/mo. Chargifyis a great recurring billing tool for small, growing businesses. They offer credit card as well as Paypal billing (flexible!) and their Small Business plan starts at $129 (500 active users) Their Small Business+ plan ($169/mo) also offers Mailchimp integrations.

19. 5 Customer and User Onboarding

20. The Expert Tip • Strategy • Best Practices Beautifully broken down onboarding flows by Samuel Hulick of useronboard.com. Samuel writes in a way that are sure to make you crack up while learning how important every step of onboarding is Case Study from Ghost.org on the onboarding metrics they tracked to increase website conversions Intercom explains why user onboarding is harder than you think it is, and how to master it

21. Autosendcan be used to reach customers inside and outside your app. There is no free plan. All plans offer Unlimited email and In-App Messages / Email Support. Pricing: Starter $50 / 500 active users / 500 SMS Growth $250 10KUsers / 10K SMS. Pro $600 30K users / 30K SMS Elev.io helps you create in-app guided website experiences. All paid plans offer unlimited modules, with limited page loads. Pricing: Free: 1 Users / 1 Active Modules 49 LITE $ 49 / mo 1 User. GROWTH $ 79 / mo 5 Team Users $199 BIG TIME $ 199 / mo 10 Team Users

22. 6 Initial Engagement (Activation)

23. The Expert Tip • Strategy The crucial nature of the first 30 days your customer uses your website or app OttNigulis’ detailed guide to understanding data and customer activation

24. Airbrake helps you track your applications for any errors or roadblocks your customers may hit along the way. Pricing: Small $39, 5 Applications Monitored, 10 team members Pro $89, 15 Apps Monitored, 20 members. Enterprise $199, 40 Apps Monitored, 30 members User Testing helps you get insights directly from your customer’s mouths. Pricing: Basic: $49/video & $99/video after first 10 videos Test across devices. 15 min max video length.

25. 7 Functional Support

26. The Expert Tip Lincoln Murphy writes about why Customer Success needs to be about making your product functional and useful.

27. FreshdeskAn easy to use knowledge bank, billing and invoice tool. Pricing: Free Trial, No Credit Card Sprout ₹0/Month 3 Agents. Blossom ₹999/Agent/Month Garden ₹1499/Agent/Month Estate ₹2499/Agent/Month (Most Popular) Forest ₹4499/Agent/Month. Billed Annually Groove HQ: Easy-to-use ticket management, knowledge base and more. Pricing: Free Plan at $0/user/month. Two Users, 1 Mailbox, Customer Histories. Groove Plus at $15/user/month Unlimited Mailboxes, Automated Workflows and Email tracking. No credit card required/ Cancel anytime. If you are a small business owner, here are 26 webinar tools you could use as part of your marketing and content offerings. Freshdesk An easy to use knowledge bank, billing and invoice tool. Pricing: Free Trial, No Credit Card Sprout ₹0/Month 3 Agents. Blossom ₹999/Agent/Month Garden ₹1499/Agent/Month Estate ₹2499/Agent/Month (Most Popular) Forest ₹4499/Agent/Month. Billed Annually

28. 8 Technical Support

29. The Expert Tip • Strategy Find out why the folks at OnePlus feel the need to have great Support. (Unlike Uber) Read about what makes customer support effort proactive?

30. Intercom: To acquire, engage and support customers. (Two thumbs up for their unique pricing, but good luck figuring out what exactly you need.) Pricing: Acquire, Engage, Learn and Support: Start at $49, add-ons at $4 Olark: Live Chat solution to support customers. Visitor Profiles, Canned responses and more. Tip: bill annually or bi-annually. Pricing: Bronze $17 Gold $49 Platinum $129 and Ultimate $243 / Month

31. 9 Customer Feedback Loop

32. The Expert Tip • Strategy • Food for Thought A great piece on customer feedback that highlights the various avenues you can get customer feedback from Harvard Business Review’s long piece on closing the customer feedback loop How to use forums and surveys to create a customer feedback loop

33. Qualaroo gives you customer insights for smarter A/B testing. You can try the ‘Small Business’ and ‘Professional’ plan for free (no credit card, but must submit but other details) Pricing: Small Business $63/mo Professional $199/mo Enterprise (Demo Available) $499/mo. (all billed annually) Promoter.io can help you with all your NPS needs. Pricing: Free Plan (No credit card required) 1000 surveys/month – 1 campaign. NPS LITE $97 /mo 2,500 surveys /mo / 2 campaigns NPS COMPLETE $369 /mo 25,000 surveys ENTERPRISE Unlimited Everything. Delighted lets you send out single questions to get customer feedback and analyse the results. Pricing: Free Plan Send question to 250 customers 100 sends per month $25 (plans go upto 50,000 sends per month at $999)

34. 10 Ongoing Engagement

35. Strategy • The Expert Tip • More Expert Tips • Food for Thought Nudgespot’s guide to using in-app messaging and business messengers for Customer Success will help you keep your customers engaged and active What not to do when you are trying to engage customers Crazy Egg share 27 customer retention strategies that you should be using This amazingly written article on customer engagement by David Skokis something to keep coming back to at every step of your growth

36. A customer success platform that helps you stay on top of your customer connections and ‘drive recurring value’ to them. Get in touch for pricing A customer success platform that helps you track churn risk, NPS score and upsell opportunities. Available on iOS and Android. Pricing: Plans begin at $8/user and go upto $40/user Nudgespot is a great tool to onboard, support and engage customers. Pricing: Acquire + Support: $0 100k Users + Unlimited Team Members. Onboard + Engage: $49/mo Free Plan + Triggered In-App Retain: $199/mo with Behavioural Targeting. Prime: $399/mo Team Reporting Evergage helps you achieve web personalisation for your audiences by segmenting, marketing automation, a/b testing and more. See pricing here

37. 11 Customer Driven Growth

38. The Expert Tip • Strategy Kristi Hines breaks down the steps to creating a detailed case study for your website and how to position it effectively. The good folks at Unbounce tell you How to use online marketing to perfect your customer testimonials

39. Mention is a social monitoring app that lets you track what your competitors are doing, as well as what your customers are saying about you on social media. Pricing: Tip: Opt for a Yearly Plan, save 2 months. No credit card required. Solo: $29/Mo 2 alerts / 3k mentions Starter: $99/Mo 5k mentions. Custom: Unlimited users, mentions. Amity is a Customer Success Software that can be used for SaaS customer success. It helps you track and monitor customers on their visual dashboard as well as measure portfolio health and automate messages to customers. Pricing: Get in touch for a demo/free trial.

40. 12 Customer intelligence

41. The Expert Tip • Strategy • Case Study On how to use an analytics tool like KISSmetrics to learn about how your customers use your product Understand How Expedia focused on Customer Intelligence to turn Clicks into Dollars See How Hubstaff uses Mixpanel for Customer Intelligence

42. Piwik is a free and open source data analytics platform that guarantees data privacy. Features include user-centric insights, user privacy protection and customisability Kissmetrics is the place to go if you want to start tracking and analyzing the key metrics that you can base changes on to improve conversions and reduce churn. Pricing: STARTER / $200 / 500k events. BASIC / $700 / 5 million events. PRO $2,000 / 20 mil events + more Mixpanel believes in abolishing what they call ‘bullshit metrics‘ and using funnels to track real, relevant customer engagement metrics. Pricing: Free 25,000 Data Points / $0 / Month Startup 500,000 Data Points / $150 / Month (Five more plans. Most expensive is $2000 for 50,000,000 data points)

43. 13 Customer Expansion

44. The Expert Tip • Strategy A quick read to help you understand why expansion revenue is so essential to a SaaS business The ‘Land and expand’ Strategy: Chris Yeh (VP Marketing at PBworks) discusses Customer engagement for the SaaS world.

45. Inspectletallows you to record user and visitor sessions. All plans come with Playback sessions, heatmaps, mobile support, Seamless AJAX and HTTPS support. Pricing: Free $ 0 per month 100 Recorded Sessions 1 Website Plans from $ 39 per month (5,000 Recorded Sessions / 1 Website) to $ 299 per month 125,000 Recorded Sessions 20 Websites Sprout Social Monitoring lets you track mentions, monitor content and outreach. Because in an era where Twitter is used for support, you can’t monitor your social feeds enough. Pricing: Deluxe $59 PER USER/MONTH. Plans go upto Team Plan at $500 / month (3 users) with Advanced reports and team features

46. 15 Customer Renewal

47. Strategy • Case Study • Best Practices Marketo explains How to take a weak renewal email and turn it into a powerful renewal campaign What to Measure to monitor customer renewal rates for your SaaS / cloud-based business WP Rocket discuss How they increased renewal rates by 154%

48. Planhatis a Customer Success Platform built for small and mid-sized SaaS companies. Key features include churn & up-sell alerts, advanced Success Playbooks and Customizable Health Score. It integrates with SaaS products like Slack, Salesforce, and Zendesk. There is also an open REST API. Pricing: Get in touch for a free trial.

49. 14 Customer Retention

50. The Expert Tip • Strategy • Case Study • Best Practices Evergage’s tips on how to calculate customer retention using Customer Retention Rate (CRR) and Dollar Retention Rate (DRR) Sweet tooth rewards offers the ultimate guide to customer retention Groove HQ shared their strategies to retain customers Learn how Symantec created a digital experience that reduced churn from Marketing Sherpa