How to Delight SaaS Users

The Importance of "Delight" in the World of SaaS

A Harvard Business Review study found that “emotionally connected” customers are more than twice as valuable as “highly satisfied” customers. The study demonstrated this increased value by determining that “emotionally connected” customers are:

• More likely to buy more of your products and services. 
• Less price-sensitive. 
• More likely to pay close attention to your communications. 
• More likely to take suggestions or advice. 
• More likely to recommend your products or services to others.

The increased value of  “emotionally connected” versus “highly satisfied” is why you often hear the term “delight” thrown around in the SaaS space. Merriam-Webster defines delight as “a high degree of gratification or pleasure.” Emotion isn’t mentioned, but gratification and pleasure are emotions. The Norman Neilson Group takes this a step further, saying “delight qualifies as any positive emotional effect a user may have.”

The Benefits of Delight

It’s not just the Harvard Business Review study that has evangelized the importance of delight. 

• Numerous studies find that humans are driven by and make decisions based on emotions. 
• Zendesk reports that 24% of buyers continue using vendors for two-plus years after emotionally positive experiences. 

Establishing emotional connections through delight is an easy way to give your customers additional value and influence how they interact with your products or services. This post will share five ways SaaS companies can delight their users.

Five Ways to Delight Your SaaS Customers 

• Communicate Efficiently and Frequently
• Make Data-Driven Decisions
• Solve Challenges Your Customers Are Facing
• Help Customers Succeed
• Constantly Innovate

Communicate Efficiently and Frequently

Communication is the core of every business. Good communication helps develop trust, build rapport, articulate needs, and identify barriers. Good customer communication includes:

• Ensuring customers can quickly get in contact with you: Don’t make customers guess or reach out to their contact person—clearly publish pertinent contact information. Additionally, don’t make customers jump through hoops to speak with an actual human. 
• Don’t ignore tough conversations: It can be easy to dismiss “squeaky wheel” customers—those who always have a complaint, concern, or suggestions—but when you start ignoring these customers (and everyone has them), it becomes easier to ignore complaints and concerns from all your customers. You should address every complaint or concern pleasantly and efficiently, even if there isn’t an immediate solution or resolution. 
• Personalized communication: Establishing a personal rapport with customers is essential. We’ve all patronized organizations that send out the same mass, scripted communications, and it’s apparent they’re doing so to cover all the bases, not because they genuinely want to help. We’re not advocating for writing every customer a personalized email, but it’s vital that customers occasionally feel like individuals, not just one mass audience. 

For more customer communication best practices, check out this great Forbes piece on Nine Important Lessons Leaders Have Learned About Customer Communication.

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Make Data-Driven Decisions

It might seem intuitive to make decisions based on your intuition (more than half of Americans use their “gut” to make decisions). Still, data-driven decisions are where you can most delight customers by offering new features, functionalities, solutions, and changes based on data surrounding their behavior. Data-driven decisions may unearth features, functionalities, and solutions your customers didn’t even realize they needed or wanted—surprise and delight often go hand in hand.

Data-driven decisions allow businesses to generate customer insights and predictions based on how they use your products. 

You can collect data by:

• Administering and collecting survey responses. 
• Looking for patterns everywhere.
• Analyzing customer communications in a meaningful way to determine quantifiable trends. 
• Utilizing data analytics to track and analyze how your customers interact with your platform. 
• Implementing tests or soft launches of products or features to see how they work with a control group before launching company-wide. 

Research shows that data-driven decisions:

• Help organizations make confident decisions. 
• Make organizations more productive. 
• Decrease expenses.

Tying all important decisions back to quantifiable data can do wonders for ensuring all important decisions delight your customers.

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Solve Challenges Your Customers Are Facing

The most important thing your organization should be doing to delight your customers is to solve the problems they are experiencing—that’s why they’re coming to you in the first place, right? Now, this might seem a little obvious—we’re assuming you designed your business around solving one or more common challenges—but there are a couple of easy ways your organization can take solving customer challenges to a new level. 

Help Educate Your Customers

Inbound Marketing company HubSpot went the educational route when they founded HubSpot Academy. HubSpot Academy helps users get acquainted with the HubSpot software and allows them to dig deep into other inbound marketing topics ranging from writing blogs to creating a video strategy. It’s an extra step that delights current customers, delights potential customers, and has helped HubSpot grow into the inbound marketing giant they are today.

Solve For What They Don't Know Yet 

You’ll really delight your customers if you could not only solve the problems they are well aware need solving but think ahead to their future needs. How do you go about solving customer problems that may not exist yet? This is where being data-driven can help you immensely. 

• Poll your customers to see what challenges they possess. 
• Record all interactions you have with customers and compare the information they give you—look for commonalities, then reach back out and inquire more about these commonalities. 
• Keep a tight watch on industry trends and predictions. 

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Help Customers Succeed

One of the most frustrating things for customers is getting a product and not knowing how to use it (according to PwC, 82% of HR tech users struggle with adoption). Make sure your customers have an outstanding customer experience being onboarded and using your platform. Ensure that they know where to find solutions and how to troubleshoot so that they are always delighted and never have any second thoughts about utilizing your platform. 

If you’re constantly innovating your products and services, ensure you’re providing customers with support materials. Additionally, ensure your customers know how to access their support materials and your customer support teams—you’re not going to delight anyone if finding help is frustrating. 84% of customers say their customer-service experience is as important as product functionalities and results. Today’s SaaS customers have more options than ever, so they won’t stick around if they aren’t getting support to succeed.

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Constantly Innovate

The McKinsey blog posted an article titled “Innovation in a crisis: Why it is more important than ever” in June of 2020, just as the country was coming out of the most widespread COVID-19 pandemic closures. The crux of this article is that now more than ever, it’s imperative that forward-thinking companies have to be constantly innovating and adapting to meet the ever-changing needs of their customers living in an ever-changing world. The study found that successful companies must:

• Adapt their core product to meet shifting customer needs. 
• Quickly identify and address new opportunities created by an ever-changing world of work. 
• Consistently reevaluate core solutions in context with changing customer needs. 
• Allocate resources to support innovations. 

Have an Innovator's Mindset

Remember, your customers want you to solve their problems for them, and in an ever-changing world, their challenges are constantly morphing and adapting. Today’s SaaS customers expect products to continually evolve to meet their needs.

Be a step ahead of the changes and consistently see how your organization can innovate to help your customers—set yourself apart by offering a more comprehensive or unexpected range of services than your competitors. 

Private Labeling Can Help You Quickly and Efficiently Add New Solutions

Data shows that 59% of businesses outsource in some capacity to cut costs. You can think of private labeling as a form of outsourcing. Still, instead of taking a chance on someone whose experience and effectiveness may not be tested, you’re letting an expert team manage and support your new SaaS solution, unbeknownst to the end-users you serve, who believe this private label product to be one of your proprietary applications.

Private labeling is a good tool for companies looking to grow because it allows them to quickly and cost-efficiently add new solutions, go to market fast, and expand the bandwidth of an organization’s team by gaining the expert support of the private label developers’ staff, perfect for a growing organization trying to scale! 

Here at HiringThing, we Private Label an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) hiring software built to automate, streamline, and strengthen the recruiting process. SaaS providers private label our ATS to grow their revenue, remain competitive, and provide solutions to an evergreen challenge (hiring) most SaaS customers have. Check out our blog “Ten Reasons Vertical SaaS Providers Can Benefit from a Private Label ATS” below to learn more. 

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Related Resources

• Breaking Down Common SaaS Growth Barriers
• The Ultimate Guide to Establishing a SaaS Private Label Partnership
• Five HR System Challenges and How to Solve Them

About HiringThing

HiringThing is a modern recruiting and employee onboarding platform as a service that creates seamless talent experiences. Our white label solutions and open API enable technology and service providers to offer hiring and onboarding to their clients. Approachable and adaptable, the platform empowers anyone, anywhere to build their dream team.