An Ultimate Guide To Managing Your SaaS Product Experience And Its Impact On Overall Subscription Business Growth
The subscription business model is one of the most customer-centric business models that you can find. The customer experience (CX) provides those sound foundations on which you can erect the structure of your subscription business. Effective customer support, communication, and discounts are some of the elements of improving the customer experience. However, the most important factor to improve CX is the product experience (PX).
Just imagine that you have the best SaaS subscription management software, teams for sales and marketing, but will they be able to help you if your product is not up to the expectations of customers. Your SaaS product experience depends on various factors. In this article, you are going to read about the basics of product experience (PX), some ultimate ways to manage it, and the impacts of PX on the SaaS business growth.
Product Experience & Customer Experience
Product experience is the usability of your SaaS product for customers. Other than usability, it also covers the emotions and thoughts of the customers for the product. Companies also use psychological triggers to maximize the customer experience, and marketing is the primary tool to influence the psyche of the recurring customers. The marketing campaign is planned in a way that it unknowingly creates the image of the SaaS product in the mind of the customers. Companies offering SaaS products or services improvise this image of their product with time as per the business needs.
On the other hand, customer experience is the experience of the customer at every point where the customer interacts with your SaaS company. From onboarding to customer support and subscription cancellation, the customer interacts with you at various points, and customer experience optimization is to offer the best treatment on all these points where customers interact with the business.
Now that the idea of CX and PX is clear, it is time to move towards managing the product experience.
Also Read: Subscription Retention Begins With Customer Experience Elevation—Predictions and Actions for 2021
How to Manage SaaS Product Experience
Project experience management (PxM) is nothing but knowing your product well and make sure that it fulfils the customer demands. Companies that opt for a customer-centric approach succeed in maximizing the product experience. However, when it comes to PxM, there are the following factors that you need to work on:
SaaS Product
You should know that the SaaS subscription business market is already filled with competitors. When you intend to enter the market, you should have something in your SaaS product that would bring more ease for customers. Only then you can expect to excel.
Also, the digital world is the arena where those companies survive who keep innovating. No matter how efficient and robust your product is, you would need to improvise it with time to main customer retention rate and maintain customer lifecycle value (CLV).
You see, monitoring certain KPIs help you monitor the business performance. It also pinpoints the areas where you can work to improve your SaaS product.
Sales
The next element to manage the product experience is the sales of the SaaS product or services that you have to offer. Sales teams devise the policies to launch and sometimes relaunch the SaaS products. And KPIs like lead conversion rate can help them understand whether their policies are performing as expected or not.
Pricing is an important job of sales teams. Nonetheless, they decide SaaS product price in collaboration with the marketing teams. You not only need to improvise the SaaS product to improve the product experience but also the price. Price improvisation maintains the flow of revenue stream, and if you do it properly, you can offer a better product experience with time.
Product Marketing
Reaching out to the right customers and marketing the SaaS product are important elements of the management of the product experience. A team of digital marketing experts will use the social media platforms and techniques of inbound marketing to help you stand among the competitors.
As has been mentioned that these are marketing techniques that imprint the image of your SaaS product on the minds of the customers. If you understand psychological triggers that can help in bringing more customers, then it is your first step to customer success.
The team that you dedicated to optimizing the product experience will be responsible to use the elements mentioned above. Certain KPIs that we have discussed above will show them either the team is heading in the right direction or not.
Impacts of PxM on SaaS Subscription Business
The efforts of your team for product experience management will show many positive results for your SaaS subscription business that will include:
Cross-Selling & Upselling
It is an evident fact that retaining the existing customers needs comparatively less time and resources in comparison to customer acquisition. And cross-selling and upselling are the best subscription business practices to retain the existing customers and get the chance to improve the recurring revenue. You can monitor the effects of cross-selling and upselling if you observe monthly recurring revenue (MRR) and annual recurring revenue (ARR).
Brand Awareness
Managing the SaaS product experience is a way of creating brand awareness. As we have mentioned earlier that marketing is one of the elements of PxM. When you work on the product experience, you need to improvise marketing strategies, and marketing creates brand awareness.
At this point, you need to understand that PxM is interlinked with many other business processes. The team that you make to work for improving the PX, should come up with a holistic strategy to improve product experience to achieve all business targets side by side.
Lead Conversion
The first thing that customers need is the usability of the SaaS product that you offer. All other services that you offer come next to it. The lead conversion rate highly depends on the usability and robustness of the SaaS product that you are offering. The efforts that you put in to improve the product experience will improve the lead conversion rate.
Smooth Revenue Stream
Now, you need to take a step back and observe the scenario that we have discussed to this point. Your team succeeds in improving customer experience and you become able to cross-sell & upsell, more people get to know about your product, and the lead conversion rate also improves. This improvement at different ends ultimately brings more revenue. The revenue stream becomes more stable.
There are many other business ends where improvisation of product experience brings positive impacts for the SaaS companies.
Also Read: You Need A Recurring Revenue Stream to Draw Success in 2021 And Onwards
Conclusion
SaaS product experience is interlinked and tightly knitted with many other factors. When you plan to improve the product experience, you will need to pay attention to many elements and factors side by side. Subscription management platforms are required to sell SaaS products for the subscription billing model is the best business model for SaaS businesses. SubscriptionFlow is a subscription billing software that can assist you in achieving the goal of improving the SaaS product experience.