5 ways user feedback can help SaaS companies thrive, even during difficult times

All of you will have noticed that life as a SaaS company has lately become harder and harder. With rising inflation, economic downturn and the ever growing competition on the market, focusing on the voice of customers has become an essential strategy for thriving your SaaS business. Building and nurturing real customer relationships, - and the word real cannot be stressed enough here - is key for all of us SaaS companies. 

The second element to running a successful business during tough times is to become more efficient. As most businesses currently assess the cost-effectiveness of the tools they are using, you too should assess your processes and apps in trying to become as efficient as possible. This point ties back into customer relations and loyalty as the SaaS tools generally loved by their user base won’t be the ones to get cut. So here are our 5 of the most effective ways on how user feedback can help your SaaS company thrive, even in difficult times. 

1. Deliver value

The most obvious and yet sometimes overlooked way to improve customer loyalty is to focus on delivering value for your customers. To gain some insights into the basics of this topic, I highly recommend checking out Simon Sinek’s famous theory of “starting with why”. Basically, Sinek argues that as a boss and as a business one should not merely communicate what one does but WHY one does it. The more value you manage to create for your customers with your product, the less likely they are to replace your tool. 

The most efficient way to make sure you’re building something people love, is to involve them in the process of doing so. This does however not only apply to the design processes. While it is important to get potential users on board as early on as possible, you should not stop there. According to PWC’s innovation benchmark report, 54% of companies say that customer engagement defines innovation in early ideation stages and 35% claim that customers are their most important innovation partners. At Gleap we strongly believe in listening to the voice of our customers when it comes to building our product roadmap. There’s nothing worse than building new features that do not meet the customers’ needs. I don’t know if y’all have heard about featuritis, but let me tell you, it’s a thing. 

2. Improve, improve, improve

Again, customers are less likely to get rid of a tool they love or they’re emotionally invested in. By building a user community and making them feel heard, you will get loyalty in return. And even better: your product will constantly improve. To do so, we recommend doing regular check-ins with customers - which obviously is very time consuming - or hosting feedback sessions and webinars for larger groups. Your users are the ones who use your product the most and heard users are happy users. 

On another note, bug fixing is also an important aspect that comes to mind when we’re talking about product improvements. With rising quality requirements for software, skills shortage and the need to deliver more in less time, fixing a software team’s bug fixing game (pun intended) is key. The majority of developers spend more than half of their time on fixing issues. Most of them consider the time spent trying to reproduce bugs wasted time. By moving away from conventional bug reporting with email, you can save your software team up to 50% of their valuable time. That’s why at Gleap we automatically ship all the important information such as environment data, logs and screenshots with every incoming report.  

3. Monitor customer experience

If possible we recommend testing the usability of your product with real users in real-life scenarios. This will give you amazing insights into the customer experience of your own tool. Another highly effective way of monitoring customer experience is running surveys. Standardized scores like NPS or CSAT can provide a great overview of how your users perceive your product in general. Obviously, based on the results it might be worth digging deeper and personally reaching out to selected customers. 

4. Have a great feedback system in place

For your team to be more efficient and for your users to feel heard it is vital to have a great feedback system to support your workflow. That’s exactly what you can achieve with Gleap. We help you collect feedback, triage it and close the loop with your customers all in one organized place. While users can submit feedback or answer to surveys in an instant, - which sores engagement rates - your software and support team will get standardized bug reports and responses. Gleap also lets you send automatic notifications to your users to let them know you’ve received their request or you’ve fixed their issue. Keeping users in the loop has never been easier. 

On top of all of that, Gleap empowers you to walk in the shoes of a user with session replays and video recordings. See a bug through the users’ eyes. If set up accordingly, Gleap ships a video recording of a user’s last steps with every report. Alternatively, users can record their screen and even add a voiceover to describe the issue they’re facing. 

Lastly, but nonetheless important when it comes to efficiency enhancement, you can easily integrate Gleap with all your existing tools. Be it project management or communication software, we don’t want to get in the way of your usual workflow. 

5. Drive retention

Obviously, churning customers are a natural by-product of every SaaS business. Nevertheless, keeping your churn rate as low as possible is a key factor to success. According to a report by Bain & Company, improving customer retention by 5% can lead to a 25% increase in profits. Those are the numbers behind the fact that driving retention is crucial. There are two fairly straight forward ways to prevent customers from churning. The first is to actually listen to user feedback, take the feedback seriously and act on it. The second is to talk to people who churn. As mentioned above, improving is key. Customers who churn are a source of feedback that should not be overlooked, and maybe some of them will even come back if they feel like you take their concerns seriously.