How to Scale SaaS Companies Without Losing Sight of Customer Experience

If there’s one statement that all SaaS founders and strategists will agree on is that no matter how far you scale, the one thing you need to make this growth sustainable is to place customer experience (CX) at the epicenter of your business. 

However, when quick growth happens, and you’ve got too many customers to deal with at once, customer experience is one thing most folks lose sight of, despite trying to give their best to their customers. 

We understand where you come from, which is why we’ve compiled this guide with the help of subject matter expert (SME) input to help you grow sustainably without losing sight of CX.  

10 strategies to improve CX when scaling your SaaS company

To help you achieve the delicate balance between growing your numbers and expanding while keeping a keen eye on customer satisfaction, we’ve rounded up 10 effective strategies.

These include understanding customer intent, offering free trials, harnessing feedback from loyal customers, running engaging events and podcasts, and fostering a customer-centric culture within your organization.

So, buckle up and get ready as we delve into these strategies and more, all designed to help you scale your SaaS company without losing sight of what truly matters–the customer experience.

Let’s get started, shall we? 

Scale SaaS Company #1. Find customer intent

First thing first—finding customer intent. Knowing the exact intent of your customers allows you to identify pain points, reasons for conversion, reasons for not converting, purchase drivers, and more. 

For example, if their previous vendor had slow response times, and that’s why they’ve switched to your solution, you can look at improving your customer support response times to address that pain point for your customers. 

Finding customer intent might be a little tricky at first, but you can adopt Breadcrumbs’ lead scoring model to find hidden intent signals. 

This model will also allow you to identify ideal customer profiles based on the frequency and recency of interactions, activities initiated, and demographics of your audience. 

Scale SaaS Company #2. Get insights from internal teams 

Another way to improve customer experience when scaling is to ask your internal teams for customer feedback. 

Why? Your customer support, customer success, and sales teams know the current pain points of your customers better than you because they speak with them daily. You can also use this feedback to provide a better experience to potential customers. 

“Internal teams can provide you with insights that no market/content research tool can, simply because they have first-hand data that are 100% specific to your company,” says Usman Akram, Head of SEO Growth Strategy at Flying Cat Marketing. 

Scale SaaS Company #3. Use feedback from loyal customers 

Another strategy we suggest implementing is creating a community of loyal customers. 

Consider Glossier as an example—when the company was growing, it created a Slack group that had its most loyal customers. 

Whenever they wanted to get input on new products or identify areas of improvement, they’d message the members of this group to get their insights. 

This is something you can replicate for yourself, too, when creating product updates or wanting to find blind spots. 

Scale SaaS Company #4. Offer free trials 

Offering free trials allows your customers to understand the ins and outs of your product before they purchase it. 

As such, when they actually opt to buy your products, they’d have a better understanding of how to navigate it, how long it takes to get answers from the customer support team, and what strengths and weaknesses the product has. 

Knowing what you’re getting into often induces familiarity and reduces complaints, thus elevating the customer experience. 

Scale SaaS Company #5. Make your product easy-to-navigate

The one tried-and-true way of improving CX (and creating brand loyalists) is actually putting the work into building an excellent product. 

Imagine this: If you purchased software that was easy to navigate and use, worked fast, had almost zero bugs and errors, and provided product tours to help you get the hang of the product, would you have any complaints?

We guess that you’d have very little reason to complain. So, put yourself in the shoes of your customers and consider what you’d want from your product. Once you have that answer, apply the changes to your product.

Scale SaaS Company #6. Don’t rely on chatbots—hire a specialized CX team 

When scaling, many companies rely on artificial intelligence, such as chatbots or virtual assistants, to act as customer support representatives. 

We agree that it’s a great tactic in theory. After all, if you had technology that was easy to purchase, affordable, and could scale with you, what more could you want? 

There’s just a slight problem with this strategy—your customers don’t want to speak to a robot—they want to speak to humans.

According to research conducted by CGS, 86% of customers said they’d prefer to talk to human representatives, and 71% of them said they’d be less likely to work with a brand if they had AI representatives.  

Since a majority of customers prefer to talk to humans, it seems counterintuitive to get technology onboard to do the work. 

Scale SaaS Company #7. Create a help center and community hub 

What’s the one thing every successful business has in common? 

Answer: They have a community. Consider the likes of Microsoft as an example—if you have a question relating to any of Microsoft’s products, chances are, the community support may have an answer. 

Since your business, too, is seeing the heights of success these days, why not create a community forum yourself (aka, a safe space for your customers to ask questions to other customers and receive answers)?

While at it, we also suggest creating Help Centers to answer the most frequently asked questions. 

Consider the potential benefits this plan might have. For example, before implementing this strategy, your customer support team might receive 100 questions daily. 

After implementing it, your community support might have answers to 30 questions, and your help center may have answers to 20. You reduce the number of questions by 50% there. 

Scale SaaS Company #8. Run events and podcasts

James Nesbitt, the owner of Myth Digital, says the one thing he tells his SaaS clients is to act as thought leaders for specific niches within the industry. This means scaling in such a way that you don’t lose sight of the customer and integrate your target audiences into your growth strategies by being active in their communities.

So, consider examples like sponsoring SEO events and roundtables to be seen as a “hub” of information, sponsoring podcasts, webinars, sponsorship packages, and newsletters for niche publishers, and offering discounts or free trials for their customers.

For reference, here’s an example from PandaDoc, a SaaS company hosting live events on its own platform to teach potential customers and new users about its product.

While this might essentially look like one of the product-led growth strategies, targeting and reaching out to your customers in such a way feels more authentic/organic and creates higher credibility for your brand, thus improving customer experience. 

Scale SaaS Company #9. Create a customer-centric culture  

If you want your customers to know they’re the epicenter of your business, you need to treat them that way. 

So, before anything else, change your company’s mission statement to prioritize customers first (and put this practice into action). 

Diana Stepanova, the Operations Director at Monitask, a B2B company, has a few ideas on how you can achieve this culture:

• Train and encourage employees at all levels (including those in leadership roles) to prioritize customer needs and experiences. 

• Use CRM tools and email marketing to manage customer interactions—for example, if your customer purchases something from you, send them a thank-you mail. 

• Invest in employee training programs to ensure they remain skilled and knowledgeable about the company’s offerings and customer expectations.

• Map out customer journeys and potential interaction scenarios to understand the next steps and address potential issues. 

• Encourage frequent and effective communication across departments to ensure that customer feedback is shared and improvements are implemented consistently throughout the company.

• Form a dedicated customer support team equipped to tackle customer issues head-on while still being personable and empathetic to clients’ needs.

Scale SaaS Company #10. Use analytics to shape your strategy 

Last but not least, in the golden years of technology, let’s use advanced analytics to understand customer interactions to shape our strategy. 

Here’s what we mean: when customers are interacting with your product, there might often be things left unsaid, even to support and sales teams. 

Consider minor errors—it could be that a resource page loads a second too late, the formatting of one feature looks slightly wonky, or the amount of graphics you have on your site is distracting. 

While these issues may not be pressing enough to generate conversations about them, they still create friction vis-a-vis customer interactions. And these minor issues can eventually cause a customer to snap. 

Here’s what you can do to identify and rectify the issues: use analytics to understand which pages take the longest to load, what areas of a page/feature the customer is examining the most, how many times they have opened a page, and other such issues. 

Once you have that data on hand, solve them before your customer notices anything has gone wrong. 

Wrapping Up: Next steps on scaling your SaaS Company

Scaling your business is a lot like owning a home. 

Until the time it happens, you can all but dream of it. And once you have it, you’re thrown with so many pressing problems you didn’t even know existed. 

Start by gauging your customer intent with Breadcrumbs! Grab your free account today and start building your scoring models that surface customer intent.