Losing customers is something that every business fears. Considering that the SaaS industry is a competitive one, customer retention is crucial. That’s why in this article, we are going to focus on showing you how to retain your customers with the help of a few effective tools and solutions.

What is Customer Retention?

Customer retention is a company’s ability to keep its customers over a period of time. This is an important metric that shows the level of customer loyalty. Apart from showcasing the loyalty of your clients, customer retention can also highlight customer engagement and satisfaction.

Why is Customer Retention Critical for SaaS?

Customer churn is inevitable. Not every customer that you acquire is going to use your product until the end of time. However, it’s important, especially for SaaS businesses, to focus on retaining more customers rather than constantly acquiring new customers. Why? Because it is more cost-effective. Acquiring a new customer can cost 5 to 25 times more than retaining an existing customer.

The customer retention rate (CRR) is a great indicator of your business’s health and profitability. The higher the CRR, the more money you can invest in customer acquisition. However, for each industry, there are benchmarks to show the normal CRR. For instance, for SaaS businesses, the minimum CRR is 35% and a high CRR is 93% or higher.

How to Calculate CRR?

If you want to calculate the customer retention rate of your business, you can use this simple formula: 

CRR = [E-N /S ] X 100

E = number of customers at the end of the period of time

N = number of customers you acquired during the period

S = number of customers at the start of the period

Let’s look at an example: You want to calculate your CRR for the last year. At the beginning of last year, you had 180 customers (S). You lost 15 customers, but you acquired 25 new clients (N). This means that you had 190 customers at the end of last year (E). 

CRR = [190-25/180] X 100

CRR = 91.6%

This is a pretty amazing retention rate. However, to ensure that you achieve a CRR like in our example, you will need some help, and we’ve prepared a list of tools you can use. 

Top 7 Customer Retention Tools

1. Custify

We’re starting with a complete tool that comes with multiple features and usabilities, including customer retention. Custify is a customer success tool that provides a complete overview of your customers, which makes it easier for you to proactively solve their problems. 
With Custify, you can identify at-risk customers and reduce unnecessary churn. By constantly checking your customers’ health scores, you will be able to spot upsell and cross-sell opportunities and offer your clients the best solutions for their businesses.

Best features:

• Customer 360°
• Customer health scores
• Reports
• Workflow automation

2. Nicereply

How can you improve customer retention if you don’t know how your customers feel about using your product? Nicereply is a tool that will help you gather feedback from your customers. You can choose any type of survey, from Net Promoter Score to Customer Effort Score and Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) surveys.
Nicereply is an indispensable tool for customer feedback collection because it provides highly customizable survey templates that don’t require coding. Additionally, with tens of integrations, Nicereply is going to help you find out how engaged and satisfied your customers truly are, which will help you improve the CRR.

Best features: 

• NPS, CES, and CSAT Surveys
• Analytics
• No-code customization
• Easy to set up & user-friendly interface

3. Kissmetrics

The effort to retain customers should start right at acquisition. When you attract unsuited leads, the churn rate will be through the roof. Kissmetrics is a product analytics tool that will allow you to have a clear picture of how to acquire qualified leads while also converting more trials into paying customers. 

Kissmetrics is a great tool if you want to know everything about your customers, from the lead stage up to the upselling stage. With detailed customer activity reports, you will always know how and when your clients interact with your product.

Best features: 

• All-metric dashboard
• Populations and cohort analytics
• Customer activity reports
• Full funnel analytics

4. Segment

If you want to retain customers, you need to provide seamless, compelling experiences. To create those customer experiences, you need data. Segment is a tool for which data is the heart of every business. 

Segment is a Customer Data Platform that allows you to collect and unify customer data. By collecting and aligning data across teams, you can make sure that every one of your employees understands the client’s needs and is ready to provide the best customer experience. Data collection is an essential part of customer satisfaction and, ultimately, customer retention.

Best features: 

• Journey creation
• Customer data pipeline customization
• Data protection and GDPR compliance
• Developer toolkit

5. Profitwell Retain

How many times were you unsubscribed from a platform due to a failed payment? It happens to everybody, but this doesn’t mean that businesses should lose those customers. Profitwell Retain is an all-in-one solution that can help you retain more customers. 

Did you know that you only recover 3 out of 10 customers whose payments failed? ProfitWell Retain ensures a higher recovery rate, and you only have to pay for performance. The easy and secure setup makes this one of the best retention tools, used by hundreds of leading businesses.

Best features: 

• Cancellation flows
• Tactical credit card retries
• Personalization

6. OpenLoyalty

Loyal customers are the ones that generate the most revenue. How can you retain customers? By increasing customer loyalty. OpenLoyalty is a great headless loyalty program software that allows you to create personalized loyalty programs. 

With OpenLoyalty, you can use elastic loyalty solution modules to introduce rich engagement mechanics. This tool comes with 50+ pre-built loyalty mechanics that will help you retain and engage your customers

Best features: 

• Easy-to-build loyalty programs
• Customer referral campaign creation
• Reward programs

7. ServiceBell

Providing over-the-top customer service is a great approach to retaining customers. ServiceBell is a platform that allows you to add embedded live video chat for sales and retention growth. This will help you give customers the in-person experience online. 

ServiceBell allows you to see customers browse your website in real-time, which helps you better understand customers’ journeys. This platform lets you go live and video chat with customers anytime.

Best features: 

• Granular analytics for calls, takeovers, and session views
• Session Replay
• Real-time Customer Insights

Retain customers with the right tools and experiences

These seven customer retention solutions are not competitors. They each target a different issue that can impact customer retention. Use them together or separately, depending on your business’s needs to increase retention rate and revenue.

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