It’s not enough just to build a great product anymore. The landscape for SaaS solutions is so competitive that the utility of your product is just one of many considerations that users make when deciding to renew subscriptions and continue their relationship with your business.
There are a whole load of other things that affect user perception of your product. For example, the initial sales and marketing, user onboarding, customer service, pricing, and more all come into play to form the overall customer experience (CX).
In this article, we’ll look at the biggest customer experience challenges today, and how you can solve them.
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What is customer experience?
Customer Experience (CX) refers to the wide range of interactions a business has with its users. For example, if you sell a SaaS product, every touchpoint counts towards—or subtracts from—the overall customer experience.
Some of the main areas that contribute to the overall CX of your brand include:
User experiences with the product itself, such as ease-of-use, reliability, features, and the regularity of updates.
Customer service support, self-service options, and general communication about the product.
User onboarding, educational materials, and other resources that drive product adoption.
Pricing models, ease of upgrades or cancellations, and transparency.
The overall perception of your brand, its values, and your community.
As you can see, every point of the user journey affects the overall customer experience. There are a lot of little details that you need to get right if you want to provide a great CX. In short, CX is the holistic perception that users have about your product.
OK, now let’s get into the biggest customer experience challenges facing SaaS brands.
Biggest customer experience challenges
No matter how good your product is, if you don’t create positive customer experiences, you’re at risk of losing users. With the costs of acquiring new users growing by the day, customer retention has rarely felt more important.
So, let’s explore some common roadblocks that are hiring your customer experience and what you can do to overcome these issues.
#1. User friction
As we mentioned above, customer experience is holistic. The interactions that determine how your user feels about your business happen across multi-touchpoint customer journeys. Anything along the way can act as a barrier to user success and ultimately hurt customer retention.
One of the most common points of friction for users comes from understanding the full value of the product. Not everyone is tech-savvy, and even thoughtfully designed UX can stump some users.
💡Solution: If you find that your download-to-purchase rate is below industry benchmarks, you need to look at your onboarding. Great onboarding content makes it easy for your users to realize the full value of your product and reach time to value (TTV) far quicker.
Of course, problems can occur across every stage of the customer journey. Yet, many businesses have yet to adjust to the fact that users want self-service options. Offering onboarding, access to help articles and videos, and other troubleshooting materials allow you users to solve their problems when and how they want to. In other words, it's another way to remove the friction that compromises your user’s enjoyment of your product.
#2. Responsible personalization
Modern users expect the software they use to work around them and not the other way around. Meeting their needs and preferences is an important part of a great customer experience. A rigid, one-size-fits-all approach will signal to the user that your brand doesn’t really understand them or why they downloaded your product.
The solution to the personalization problem is to use customer data to tailor your service and product around your users. However, amassing user data comes with its own complexities in a world governed by GDPR and increasing data protection.
💡Solution: Personalization really adds to the customer experience. Understanding and using user preferences, job roles, locations, and more in your onboarding can help drive home the relevance of your offer.
However, as stated above, everyone has become more concerned about data privacy, including legislators, consumers, and even some tech companies. So, how do you ensure you give users the experience they demand while also handling their data with appropriate levels of care and security?
The first thing you should consider is working only with third-party tools that are serious about data security. So, look at the data governance processes of any solution that has access to your user data. Some things to consider include how any third-party stores handle your client and user data.
Of course, if you want to go the extra mile, consider solutions that use zero-knowledge design to build products with data security as a priority and not just an afterthought.
#3. Customer retention
All interactions you have with your users can affect their opinion of your brand. No product is perfect, so you’ll have some complaints from time to time. However, how you deal with those complaints will determine whether you hold on to customers.
You see, even if customers experience frustration with your product, making sure they feel heard and valued and that their needs are being met goes a long way.
Great customer experiences build trust and loyalty, which in turn, improves the prospects of your users sticking around.
💡Solution: If you want to drive trust and loyalty, you need to regularly exceed user expectations. You can do this through a deep understanding of your customers. For example, instead of waiting for issues to occur, you can get proactive. Sending statistically at-risk customers in-app that helps them resolve their issues before they occur is enough to cut off problems before they fester.
#4. Employee knowledge
While customer self-service is a growing trend, most businesses still need customer service staff to respond to emails, messages, or phone interactions. These interactions can involve technical support, billing inquiries, complaints, and more.
Experienced customer service staff have plenty of time to learn about your product and the typical problems your users have. However, they can still struggle with less frequent products. Additionally, new team members will need time to offer the smooth, professional expertise that your users want.
Low employee knowledge has numerous consequences. For example, it could provide your users with inaccurate knowledge or even make it difficult to diagnose and resolve customer issues efficiently. Both scenarios will frustrate your users and hinder a positive customer experience.
Additionally, when your staff doesn’t fully know how to resolve an issue, they lack the surety and confidence that your users deserve when dealing with problems.
As we mentioned above, customer experience is holistic. If anyone of the major pillars fails, you’re putting your relationships at risk.
💡Solution: Ensuring that your employees have easy access to important product information, news, and technical documents is essential. Achieving these aims requires a commitment to learning and development. However, there are additional ways to augment your customer service staff’s knowledge.
Building a knowledge base is a solid way to provide customers with self-service options. However, not all knowledge bases need to be external. You can also build information repositories that are for internal use. Ensure they’re well organized and easily searchable, and you’ll guarantee that even new customer service operatives have important information at their fingertips.
#5. Getting the right feedback
Getting feedback is one of the most important and valuable parts of running a business. The benefits are endless, including things like helping you understand your target audience, providing ideas for how to improve your product, validating new ideas, and fostering a user-centric culture within your business.
It’s important to remember that unhappy users are most likely to provide feedback. However, while this information is valuable, if it’s the only feedback you get, it will be skewed towards what your app is not doing well.
💡Solution: Getting solid, reliable feedback isn’t always easy. While you can send out emails to your users, low response rates are common. One of the best solutions is to send out regular short surveys at the right time. For example, if your users engage with customer support, a short NPS or CSAT in-app survey right after the interaction will give you a great insight into how things went.
Final thoughts: Get the right tools for the job
Solving each of these top customer experience challenges requires getting the right tools for the job. However, instead of rushing out and getting subscriptions to a wide range of software tools, you can consolidate all these solutions into one tool: Usetiful.
If you want to create great in-app onboarding like product tours and walkthroughs, Usetiful’s no-code tools have your back. With a simple and easy-to-use interface, you can build the content you need to remove friction from your user's lives.
What’s more, Usetiful is GDPR-compliant and ISO27001 certified, meaning your user data is safe, secure, and ready to meet the most exacting privacy regulations. But that’s not all; Usetiful also allows you to overlay in-app or embed banners and surveys, allowing your messaging and surveys to stay on point.