5 Ways Our Clients Make Us a Better SaaS Company

Ask any SaaS company’s customer success manager what their day-to-day is like, and you’ll find some common themes: onboard and advise clients, respond to questions and support tickets, hop on calls to troubleshoot and discuss strategy. Appboy’s Success Squad is no different, but as we’ve continued to scale over the course of last year, additional themes have emerged. Not only do we need to teach clients, but it’s our job to learn from them as well.

Luckily for us, our customers have made this pretty easy. We’re grateful for the feedback they share and their commitment to a successful partnership. Most of all, we appreciate their understanding that this is a journey for all of us, and as we try to create and improve a groundbreaking tool, there will be some challenges that are best navigated together.

As we look back over the past year, there are a few specific customer success best practices Appboy has learned that have shaped both our product and our culture. Thank you to our clients for helping us grow!

1. Leverage client experiences to improve UI/UX.

With each new feature, our platform’s functionality becomes more advanced. Without the right dashboard design, our product would become increasingly complex as well. By proactively soliciting feedback on recent releases and conducting UX testing with clients, we’ve gained a better understanding of how Appboy is used, and funneled these lessons into design improvements.

2. Proactively communicate changes in workflow.

Marketers that log on to Appboy every day are often startled when new features or designs change the processes they’re accustomed to. Last year, our team received many questions related to platform updates, which signaled a need for more proactive client communication. To better prepare them for new features and help them adapt to changes faster, we’ve begun alerting clients of new and upcoming features via newsletter emails, in-browser notifications, and dashboard News Feed Cards.

An Appboy dashboard notification in action

3. Keep onboarding personal.

As Appboy grows, our team scales by creating materials that streamline user onboarding, such as client-facing presentations and worksheets. One aspect of onboarding we’ve held onto is the personal touch—time and time again, our customers tell us how much they appreciate onboarding that’s catered to their business’s specific goals and challenges.

4. Expand outreach within a client’s company.

While much of our daily emails and calls are with a designated marketing point person or group of dashboard users, we’ve found that expanding the conversation to include UX designers, product managers, and engineers can be extremely valuable. Our customers have taught us that gathering multiple perspectives on their app’s user journey and campaigns can lead to better strategies.

5. Relationships develop when you create a community.

One reason why our customers are so eager to participate in Appboy’s annual conferences like LTR and meetups in New York, San Francisco, and Denver, is that they’re excited to meet our Success Squad in person. These interactions strengthen our business partnerships and our relationship with the wider mobile marketing community.

October 2015’s #EngagemeetupNYC co-hosted by Appboy and Apptimize. Left to right: Dave Wisdom, Success, Appboy; Samantha John, Co-Founder + CTO, Hopscotch; Brian Donohue, CEO, Instapaper; Miles Lennon, Product Area Lead, Spotify

As we take on 2016, we’ll continue to use these best practices and, as always, keep an eye out for more insights from our clients. Here’s to the new year!