A customer engagement strategy is critical for retaining and growing SaaS clients. It’s especially important to engage executives and stakeholders to ensure retention. In this blog, we’ll look at the essentials of a customer engagement strategy, particularly how to use it to engage enterprise clients. After considering what a customer engagement strategy is and its benefits, we’ll offer ten key tips for keeping enterprise executives and stakeholders engaged. We’ll follow up by honing in on how to optimize your customer engagement strategy by using KPI tracking and customer success software to maximize your results.
What Is a Customer Engagement Strategy?
A customer engagement strategy is an action plan for promoting active client use of your SaaS product. A comprehensive customer engagement strategy promotes client interaction with your product at every stage in the customer lifecycle, from the freemium and onboarding stages through adoption and renewal to expansion and brand advocacy. An engagement strategy promotes client actions and activities such as:
- Completion of onboarding set-up
- Regular usage of accounts and product features
- Adoption of advanced product features
- Renewal of subscriptions
- Trials of upsell products
- Referrals
In the context of B2B SaaS products geared toward enterprise users, the customer engagement strategy seeks to promote adoption by product users, executives, and stakeholders. B2B executives and stakeholders are engaged when they see that product usage is helping their company achieve its business goals efficiently and cost-effectively. Communicating this requires high-touch engagement strategies, such as meeting with executives and stakeholders to establish goal-oriented KPIs and review performance.
What Are the Benefits of Customer Engagement Strategies?
Prioritizing customer engagement strategies that include executives and stakeholders provides several significant advantages for B2B SaaS companies:
- Including executives and stakeholders in your engagement strategy helps win over decision-makers who influence purchasing decisions.
- Communicating with decision-makers helps align clients’ use of your product with their business goals, highlighting the benefits they receive from your product.
- Engaging decision-makers in discussions about performance goals and metrics provides a transparent, objective basis to demonstrate product value.
- Promoting product usage increases the value clients derive from your product, increasing the likelihood of renewals, upsells, and referrals.
- Prioritizing client engagement can help you anticipate support issues and avoid problems that could cause churn.
These benefits tend to encourage enterprise client retention and reduce churn. Totango reduced client churn to 7% in 2021 by applying customer engagement strategies.
Ten Customer Engagement Strategies for Enterprise Clients
To develop an effective engagement plan for enterprise clients, consider incorporating these best practices:
- Meet with managers, executives, and stakeholders to learn more about their business goals and fully understand the ROI they expect from using your product.
- Use a customer journey map to structure your client engagement plan and identify success outcomes and best practices for each stage of engagement.
- Automate your onboarding process to quickly bring your enterprise client up to speed on your product. The sooner they can incorporate your product into their daily workflows, the sooner they will start to see results.
- Establish KPIs to track client engagement and progress toward success outcomes.
- Use a customer success platform to monitor customer adoption and satisfaction with your product throughout your customer lifecycle.
- Based on performance monitoring, use personalized customer engagement data to trigger automated and manual workflows that maximize adoption from active clients and encourage more significant activity from clients with low engagement.
- Prioritize responsive customer support by using automation to scale and speed up support and monitor metrics such as average response time.
- Hold periodic meetings with executives and stakeholders to review performance and adjust.
- Build client communities using tools such as social media and help discussion boards.
- When releasing new products, solicit client feedback and announce releases early to promote a sense of client investment in your brand.
Incorporating all of these engagement strategies effectively will take time. For best results, create a step-by-step adoption plan and implement one element at a time to test the effectiveness and make adjustments as needed.
How to Track Customer Engagement
Track customer engagement by using your customer journey map to establish engagement KPIs for critical stages in your client interactions. Important engagement metrics include:
- License utilization rate: What percentage of authorized licenses is the client’s team actually using?
- Product adoption rate: How actively is the client performing actions such as logging in?
- Support metrics: How many support tickets has the customer opened, and what have the results been?
- Customer sentiment: What do metrics such as Net Promoter Score indicate about the customer’s satisfaction and enthusiasm for your product and brand?
- Customer health score: Does the client’s customer health score indicate high engagement and satisfaction or low engagement and risk of churn?
- Stakeholder engagement: How often have vital executives and stakeholders engaged with your product and team by logging in or participating in communications, such as meetings?
This last item is essential for keeping enterprise clients engaged. Be sure to track the engagement of executives and key stakeholders and overall engagement by the client’s team.
How to Automate Engagement by Investing in Customer Success Software
For SaaS businesses, most client engagement is digital engagement, making your technology selection critical for an effective engagement strategy. One of the most essential technology tools you can use to boost engagement is a customer success platform. Customer success platforms use automation to help you deliver client outcomes aligned with their business goals. This can be especially useful for demonstrating the value of your product to enterprise clients.
The Totango customer success platform promotes results clients want by using a modular framework called SuccessBLOCs to automate success outcomes at each customer journey stage. SuccessBLOCs combine KPI monitoring and reporting tools with automatically triggered tasks called SuccessPlays which implement best practices for each customer journey stage. For example, if a client has not logged in for a while, this might trigger an automated email reminding them of a product feature relevant to their needs which would help them derive value from your product.
This approach lets you combine the efficiency of automation with personalized attention based on individual customer data. This reduces the workload on your customer success team, with automation handling the standardized aspects of your success strategy, freeing your representatives up to focus on clients who need human attention. In this way, your customer success team can scale your engagement strategy to handle more enterprise clients without sacrificing the quality of service.
Deploy a Customer Engagement Strategy to Retain Enterprise Clients
A customer engagement strategy helps you promote enterprise client retention by delivering outcomes that align with the expectations of executives, stakeholders, and product users. Strategies such as customer journey mapping, KPI monitoring, personalized engagement, stakeholder performance reviews, and automation can help implement customer engagement plans.
Your customer success platform forms a key component of your customer engagement automation strategy, empowering you to deliver engaging outcomes consistently and at scale. Totango’s customer success platform is designed to help you implement customer success strategies for clients throughout each stage of the enterprise customer journey. Try it free to see how using customer success software can help you keep enterprise clients engaged.
