You’ve heard it all before. Customer Success for SaaS startups is NOT about creating happy customers. Customer Success is about helping them use your product well and derive value from it. You need to be there every step of the way…yada yada yada.
What all these lists don’t tell you is that the value chain for a customer to successfully use your product is long and keeping them engaged is a process filled with a combination of
- highly efficient and effective tools
- implementing proven and experimental strategies
- making your product and services better
- following best practices for success
- research and reading to understand the ‘bigger picture’
- trials
- and of course, error
We decided to do something that would make this process easier. We took every step of the Customer Success Lifecycle for SaaS startups as broken down by Lincoln Murphy in his incisive and thorough piece on the Definition of Customer Success and built on it with links to the best strategies by CEOs and award winning bloggers, tips, case studies and the free/paid tools that you will need along the way.
Whether you are bootstrapping or have a budget to spend, think of this as an essential reading list. Here, you will get an idea of the various ingredients involved in creating Customer Success magic for your SaaS startup. The best part? You can dip into and find use for every step of the way. Here goes!
The SaaS Customer Success Lifecycle
- Customer Development
- Customer Acquisition
- Sales Process Engagement
- Billing and Payment
- Customer and User Onboarding
- Initial Engagement (Activation)
- Functional Support
- Technical Support
- Customer Feedback Loop
- Ongoing Engagement
- Customer Driven Growth
- Customer intelligence
- Customer Expansion and Renewal
- Customer Retention
- Post-Churn Follow Up
Customer Development
Before you even have customers, you need to know who your ideal customer is and figure out the best way to reach out to them and get their attention. This doesn’t mean you do customer development only before you launch. When creating a new product or entering a new market segment, finding customers who are enthusiastic about your product is the right start to win at customer success for SaaS startups.
The Expert Tip: Ray Wu’s 3 step guide on how to do Customer Development right. (Spoiler Alert: He says creating the right customer profile might not always be possible) 
Strategy: This list by KISSmetrics has over 26 awesome resources to help youstart interviewing your customers and building your product.
Strategy: Justin of Customer Dev Labs on How to interview your customers.
Food for Thought: Ash Maurya On how we need to rethink Customer Development for startups and web apps.
Basics: 13 Quora answers on How to design an effective Survey for 
Customer Development
Helprace lets you design customer surveys to reach out to potential customers and understand their needs.
Pricing: All plans come with Ticketing support + knowledge base.
Free Forever – 3 Agents | Targeted: $9 agent/mo | All-In: $18 Everything
Survey.io lets you create surveys and send them by email to your prospects.
Pricing: Gated. Appears once you provide details of your campaign.
Customer Acquisition
This is the stage where you need to go all out and target a large portion of your potential audience. From referrals and rewards to emails, phone calls and SEO boosts – you need all the help you can get. Beginning acquiring customers the wrong way could lead to disengaged, uninterested customers who do not see value in your offering. Knowing who the right customer for you is and acquiring more like them is crucial for customer success in the long run.
The Expert Tips: A very in-depth look at the customer acquisition process
Core Metrics: The core metrics you need to track to acquire customers
Food for Thought: Consult the ‘Ultimate SaaS Pricing Guide‘ to improve and important part of your product marketing that directly affects the number of customers you acquire.
Referral Candy’s Exhaustive list of Customer Acquisition Tools from website add-on bars and email marketing tools to SEO tools that will boost conversions.
Get the word out about your product or service using Beta Testing Services- Erli Bird
- Product Hunt
- Beta List
Quickmail.io Lets you follow up on your email outreach.
You can also track open and reply rates, automate mails and follow ups and stop follow ups on reply, A/B test mails
Pricing: Free Trial: 14 days. No credit card required.
Monthly: $49 (mail 200 prospects/day) | $69 (mail 500 prospects/day)
Videoscribe
Helps you create simple white board ‘explainer’ videos to talk about your product. Discounts for registered charities.
Pricing: Monthly $12 Billed annually at $144 or Monthly $29
Kick Off Labs
A useful tool to create landing page campaigns, lead capture forms, social referrals and viral campaigns.
Pricing: All plans offer unlimited landing pages, a/b testing and launch templates. Business $104/mo | Premium $48/mo | Starter $27/mo.
