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Driving Growth Through Customer Success: Essential Strategies for SaaS Businesses in 2025

Master SaaS customer success strategies for 2025. Learn key principles, metrics, and best practices to enhance user adoption, reduce churn, and drive long-term value.

Written by

Duncan Elder

Last updated

December 5, 2024

BettermodeHQ

Table of contents

You must have heard "It's less expensive to keep a current customer than to find a new one." In the context of SaaS customer success, this principle highlights the importance of customer engagement, strong relationships with customers and value delivery to ensure retention and create opportunities for upsells, cross-sells and even referrals.

This statement has a profound impact on the bottom line of any business. According to Forbes, acquiring a new customer can cost five to seven times more than retaining an old one.

This is especially true in the world of SaaS (Software as a Service). SaaS businesses rely on recurring customers who are happy, loyal and empowered to extract maximum value from a product. Hence, SaaS customer success is a critical element for sustained business growth.

Happy and loyal customers have the highest customer lifetime value and refer their peers to your business. This art and science of customer satisfaction and creating advocates is known as customer success.

This article explores what SaaS customer success is, what it entails and how you can implement it for your company or SaaS companies.

Let's get started.

Customer-focused functions in B2B SaaS

You cannot define SaaS customer success without first differentiating it from its closely associated business functions: customer experience and customer support.

‍Customer support is reactive by nature, not proactive. Customers get assigned support when they encounter problems and the objective is to solve them as quickly as possible before sending them on their way.

In a way, customer support is all about putting out fires, while customer success is more concerned with replacing that old faulty wiring (and making sure that the fire extinguisher still works).

‍Customer experience, often run by the Chief Customer Officer (CCO), is a bit tougher to differentiate. In a nutshell, it's account management. It's about building a positive association with your brand in every customer interaction.

This can include tasks like helping the product team with new features based on customer feedback data and referring customers to the right person when a problem arises.

If customer support is reactive then customer experience is best described as interactive. This team is involved in delivery, feedback, awareness and other methods of communication throughout the customer lifecycle.

Customer success is somewhat similar to customer experience, but the key difference is that it is focused on finding new ways for the customer to get the maximum possible value from a product.

In practice, a member of your customer success team will help a customer learn to use a new feature in a way that hasn't been done before. This can create an emotional response from the customer, which is later recorded and analyzed by the customer experience team.

These customer success teams are all related and a customer may meet each of them. This varies a lot by industry and doesn't happen sequentially.

Now, let's take a deep dive into defining customer success.

Hubspot, a reliable source of business wisdom, describes customer success like this:

Customer success is anticipating customer challenges or questions and proactively providing solutions and answers. Customer success helps you boost customer happiness and retention, thus increasing your revenue and customer loyalty.

This definition shows how important it is to predict where problems arise during the customer journey (or an average customer lifespan). But it misses out on one important element.

Here's another definition from customer success consultant Lincoln Murphy.

Customer success is when your customer achieves their desired outcome through interactions with your company.

This definition really drives the point home. The desired outcome is a core concept that customer success managers need to understand better than anyone else.

Your customer has a desired outcome even if they don't realize it yet. Part of the process involves a deep understanding of what the customer needs from your product and the problems they encounter daily.

The goal of SaaS customer success is to help them fix their problems so that they are open to upselling opportunities and referrals.

Overall, customers need to feel like they are using your product better than anybody else. This is what authentic customer loyalty looks like and is the basis of a customer success plan.

Why SaaS customer success is important

It shouldn't come as a surprise that our very own Bettermode, a company that enables businesses to build customer communities, is emphasizing customer success.

After all, customer success is a vital part of our industry and we care about it. A lot.

If you have doubts about the importance of customer success, here's what other industry veterans have to say on the subject.

Check out these wise words from Marc Benioff, co-founder, chairman and CEO of the software company Salesforce:

Once you know what you want and what is important for you to achieve, also define the values associated with it. What is important? That is something a lot of entrepreneurs pass by too quickly. For us, the things that were important were No. 1, customer success. Nothing is more important to us than making sure every customer is successful in our service.

As well as words from Don Peppers, an author and a founding partner of Peppers & Rogers Group:

Your job, if you’re a customer success manager, isn’t to make friends with your client. Your primary job is to challenge them and get them to think, in order to make them more successful.

Customer success is vital enough to require valuable resources within your organization.

It is relevant enough that it should already have been implemented—especially for SaaS companies.

In reality, it justifies its own existence through the insights that gained from developing relationships with your customers.

An effective customer success strategy often drives the following benefits for SaaS companies:

Reduced customer churn rate as unsatisfied customers have their problems dealt with
Increased customer interaction, leading to more opportunities to upsell and cross-sell
Improved customer referral rates and decreased customer acquisition cost as your best customers become brand ambassadors, sharing their stories of success in their circle of influence

All of these factors have a profound impact on profits and average revenue, but it all comes back to the wisdom from the beginning of this article: it is much cheaper to keep an existing customer than to get a new one.

Where customer success fits in your SaaS company

Customer success doesn't work well in a silo. It relies on close collaboration with a large chunk of your organizational chart.

Your marketing and sales teams are the first part of this. Their job is to ensure that the right customers are evaluating and subscribing to your product in the first place. If their desired outcome is impossible, then it's not worth the cost of onboarding them just to watch as they later leave unsatisfied.

The product team should rely on customer success (and customer experience) for valuable feedback that informs how they can improve the product.

The customer satisfaction score

The finance department needs to understand the investment that goes into customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction metrics and a customer satisfaction score help businesses measure the performance of these programs. Strong reporting and dashboards that empower these departments in decision-making are critical here.

SaaS customer success strategies to consider

Here's how to implement customer success tools in your organization.

Establish a roadmap

Customer success isn't a concept that should wait until your organization is "big enough". Ideally, it is part of your business plan from day one.

Any company looking to implement customer success needs a roadmap. Building this involves input from stakeholders at every level of your organizational chart, but your existing customers are really where key insights come from.

Build a customer journey map

A customer journey map visually represents each customer interaction with your SaaS company. It must cover everything from when a customer discovers your brand to the point they become advocates and eventually churn (they become churned customers). This allows you to see how customers engage with your brand from the customer's point of view.

When you have clarity around how customers are interacting with your company at each touchpoint, you'd be better equipped to set the customer up for success. You'll be able to measure customer success, focusing on customers' journey after signing up for your product.

Determine what your customers expect

Take note of the factors that made your most faithful customers stick around and common pain points from those who didn't. Most importantly, define what your customer's ideal experience is like. Also, look into your competitors' customer success programs and identify if they are doing something better.

Allocate resources

Aside from finding a dedicated Customer Success Manager (CSM), your team will need to find people who understand your product better than anyone to stand on the front lines as customer success roles. Typically, there will be a VP of Customer Success, Director(s) of Customer Success and Customer Success Managers. There are optional positions such as Customer Success Operations Manager and Customer Success Analyst.

Select your tech stack

Most customer success programs rely on a mix of manual and automated (software-based) execution. The customer success technology landscape is filled with numerous software vendors. A solid starting point is to dissect the roles and responsibilities of the customer success team and map the tools for each segment.

Check out our article on the best customer success software to learn more about the tech stack.

Establish metrics for customer success

Similarly to the wider world of business metrics, getting lost in a maze of customer success KPIs is easy. Before you implement your customer success strategy, reach a consensus about what metrics matter most and set realistic goals with the customer in mind.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in this space should be customer-centric. As much as there are dollars on the line, this has a lot to do with human behavior and emotion. Here are two common KPIs in this space.

Net Revenue Retention is the first metric on the list. NRR captures the effects of customer churn, up and down-sells and cross-selling with your existing customers. An NRR of over 100% signifies growth in your customer success efforts. This metric can easily be calculated using annual recurring revenue (ARR), another important customer success KPI.

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a general health indicator or an effective way to measure how likely your customers are to recommend your brand to a friend or colleague. After surveying your customer base, respondents are broken into three categories: promoters, passives and detractors. Your final score is the difference between the percentage of promoters and detractors. SaaS companies keep a close eye on this customer success metric, which is a strong indicator of loyalty.

Track Customer Health Score

A typical customer who subscribes to a SaaS product goes through different stages. For instance, the journey starts from trial/demo, then moves to purchase and finally customer success team onboards the customer. The following stages are about delivering value consistently to reduce customer churn and uncovering up-sell/cross-sell opportunities.

The goal here is to use various indicators associated with customers, categorize them and assign scores for each category. That would give you the Customer Health Score and enable your team to identify ways to move customers in the lower spectrum to the upper one.

Here are some of the common categories of indicators:

Revenue, which suggests business growth over time and renewal frequency (annual/monthly)
Product usage indicates the number of seats, organizational adoption, features used and customer retention rate
Satisfaction metrics, including NPS, Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) and Customer Effort Score (CES)
Relationship which suggests customer interaction frequency, customer age and quality of feedback

Map touchpoints for customer success strategy

There are numerous touchpoints where customers can be set up for success in a typical SaaS company. Here's the list of the most important ones:

Customer support. Your customers would need some support in troubleshooting issues across the customer journey. So, create a channel to enable customers to report issues, keep them updated on the status and solve the issue. The three popular ways to handle this are live chat, ticketing systems and online customer communities.
‍Customer education. Learning management plays an important role here. You need to build comprehensive content resources on how to best use your product.
‍Customer online community. Customer community touches your customers across the lifecycle. You can allow customers to connect with each other so they can offer help and share knowledge and best practices. You can also create specific spaces in your community to host learning resources, such as documents, videos, webinars, etc. Apart from that, you can also collect feedback and get product ideas.
Customer Relationship Management tools (CRM). CRM solutions contain valuable information associated with customer goals, use cases, existing obstacles and customer value. This contextual information enables the customer success team to help customers from the very beginning.
‍Customer feedback. Collecting and evaluating customer feedback and closing the loop is a primary element of customer success. Allow yourself to observe customers and listen to their pain points so you can devise the right solutions.
‍Customer onboarding. Onboarding plays a pivotal role since it allows you to ensure the customer realizes the product's value from the beginning.
Customer communication. Communicating and keeping customers informed is essential. Certain communications are automated and some are manual—this is accomplished with a combination of channels such as email, business messaging apps (e.g., Slack), in-app messaging, etc.
Product adoption. When you release new features, it is important to ensure that your customers are aware of the improvements and are empowered to use them. With the product's adoption, the updates a SaaS company releases would be futile.

Defining new product features based on customer feedback

Improve your onboarding experience

Targeting your onboarding process is a critical step in your customer success strategy.

This is because the onboarding experience has a significant impact. According to HubSpot, you can lose up to 75% of your new users during their first week with the product. ‍ Examine your existing onboarding strategy by looking critically at the following factors.

Level of automation

At what point of the process are automated welcome emails and check-ins used? How does this relate to when customers typically drop off?

Automation is key to ensuring your team isn't overwhelmed, but this shouldn't be at the customer's expense.

Communication between teams

Does your customer success team speak to a prospect before a sale is made? If not, they should.

The handoff from the sales team to the success team should be gradual and collaborative. This shows trust and commitment and can give strong visibility into customer needs.

Providing value early

Your new users must feel productive and comfortable with your product early in onboarding. This can be described as the "aha" moment, where they are motivated and eager to adapt the product to their specific needs. Content resources and webinars are important in delivering the assets required to set up your SaaS product for success.

A customer experiencing the "aha" moment

Set up Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs)

QBRs are widely adopted for clients on higher pricing tiers and are typically onboarded via a high-touch sales model. QBRs allow the customer success team to track the client's progress with time and provide guidance to ensure that clients' goals are met.

Also, this approach enables your team to identify potential problems from the customer's account activity and address them. Your customer success can use these review opportunities to keep the customers updated with new features and the product roadmap. The key here is to prepare a robust checklist document for QBRs that you can use to help clients in a personalized way.

Leverage customer self-service

Some of the most important metrics that your organization prioritizes can be influenced by something other than your customer success team. It's called customer self-service.

Even though this may seem like a cop-out or a justification to cut back on spending ("can't the customer just help themselves with this problem?"), it is an important part of your overall strategy to ensure a high customer satisfaction score.

Effective customer self-service means giving reliable and easy-to-understand answers to the problems that your customer might experience. This can take many forms including:

Online communities that connect customers with peers and empower members to solve problems with minimal interference from the internal team. Bettermode Community Platform has been adopted by businesses to engage customers and facilitate peer-to-peer connections.

Content in the form of a knowledge base or an FAQ section. This content needs to be consistently updated and easy for customers to understand and navigate.
Multimedia content. How-to videos fit in here. Remember that customers have unique learning styles and some will prefer a tutorial video over a lengthy blog post.

The end result of good self-service is fewer tickets for your customer support team, decreased customer churn and reliable data about which problems customers are having. Customer success self-service content also fits in nicely with content strategy and can boost your organic traffic and SEO accordingly.

Above all, think about this concept like a great retail shop, where knowledgeable and helpful employees know when to leave the customer alone and let them explore at their own pace.

Listen to your customers

Listening to your customers doesn't sound like a complicated concept. To many companies, it is a box-ticking exercise. All you need to do is run some follow-up surveys and ask your top customers about any problems they are encountering, right?

Not quite. Effective listening is about connecting with them and giving them space to connect with each other; not just answering their questions or asking "what's wrong?".

Part of this is training your customer success team on tactics they can use on their next success call. A company-wide culture of active listening and humanistic problem solving is essential for long-lasting customer relationships. So, invest to make sure that this experience is consistent.

How Bettermode can help you keep your SaaS customer success levels high

As mentioned before, customer success is crucial in driving growth, reducing churn and increasing customer lifetime value. Customer lifetime value represents the total revenue a customer generates over their relationship with your company and improving it should be a top priority for any SaaS business.

As your SaaS business scales, you must ensure customers can derive value from your product and business, using the right customer success tools.

One such tool is Bettermode, a customer community platform that can empower your SaaS company to enhance its customer success efforts. By providing a space for engagement, knowledge sharing and personalized support, Bettermode helps SaaS businesses build strong relationships and improve overall customer success metrics.

Here’s how Bettermode can help you keep your customer success levels high.

Building a stronger customer community

One of the most powerful ways to ensure long-term customer success is to build an online community where customers can share knowledge, troubleshoot and learn from each other.

Bettermode provides an intuitive community platform that encourages engagement rate among your customers and creates a sense of belonging and trust in your brand. When customers feel they are part of a community, they are more likely to remain loyal, refer others and engage with your product.

Bettermode's community platform can be customized to your brand's needs, offering features like discussion forums, Q&A sections and peer-to-peer support. This helps customers resolve issues faster and allows them to discover new ways to use your product through interactions with other users.

Customers from the same online community meeting in real life and talking

Utilizing self-service resources

Effective support is essential to any SaaS business's customer success plan.

Bettermode helps you create a self-service support hub where customers can find solutions to common problems without needing to contact your support directly. This is especially important if your company has a growing user base, as it ensures that customers can resolve their issues quickly, without your customer support agents’ assistance.

With Bettermode’s knowledge base and resource center, you can easily organize FAQs, troubleshooting guides, video tutorials and product documentation in one centralized location.

Customers can access these resources anytime. The ability to solve problems independently creates a sense of empowerment in customers, contributing to a more positive experience and greater customer satisfaction.

Supporting continuous learning

One of the biggest challenges in SaaS customer success is ensuring that customers fully adopt and utilize your product. Often, customers may not explore your product's features, leading to underutilization. Bettermode addresses this issue by offering a space for customers to continuously learn about your product through educational content and product updates.

Bettermode allows you to create product-focused courses, webinars and workshops that help customers understand how to maximize the value of your product. Through the community and interactive content, customers are more likely to explore new features, ask questions and share their experiences, leading to better product adoption and overall success.

Using customer feedback for continuous improvement

Customer feedback is crucial for improving your product and customer success. Bettermode allows you to collect feedback through surveys (thanks to the MailChimp integration), polls and discussions within the community. With this data, you can understand customer pain points and identify areas for product improvement.

Our community engagement platform also enables you to involve customers in product development by allowing them to vote on feature requests. Such an approach improves your product and makes customers feel heard and valued. When customers know that their feedback directly influences product updates, it strengthens their relationship with your brand and their need to remain loyal to your company.

Motivating you to be proactive

One of the most effective ways to drive customer success is by being proactive rather than reactive.

Bettermode offers tools for monitoring customer interactions and engagement levels. Through analytics and reports (with Amplitude), you can track which customers are active in the community and which ones are struggling with particular features. You can create tactics based on real data.

With this data, your customer success team can reach out to customers proactively, offering them assistance and preventing churn before it happens.

Monitoring customer interactions in an online community

Scaling customer success

As your SaaS business expands, maintaining high levels of customer success can become a bit of a challenge.

Bettermode is designed to grow as your business grows, allowing you to manage growing customer bases without compromising service quality.

Our community website builder and its automation features and templates (like Saasplex, Bytelink, WorkEase or Cloud Project), such as community moderation tools and automated emails, allow you to manage interactions without overwhelming your team. You can create a personalized experience for different customer segments, ensuring that each customer receives the attention they need.

By providing you with an easy-to-manage, scalable solution for customer engagement, our platform allows your customer success team to focus on impactful activities, including onboarding new customers, managing churn risks and finding upsell opportunities.

Conclusion

Ensuring high customer success levels in your SaaS company requires a proactive approach that emphasizes customer engagement and continuous value delivery.

With the Bettermode platform, you can build a thriving customer community, provide valuable self-service resources, create a culture of ongoing learning and gather actionable feedback—all while offering personalized support.

Bettermode is to ensure that as your business grows, your customer success remains top-notch, helping you maintain strong customer relationships, reduce churn and drive long-term success.

Get started with Bettermode; it’s free!