The SaaS market is fragmented, with tens of thousands of providers servicing thousands of different types of customers – each with unique onboarding and implementation requirements. When you improve your implementation process, you stand out in a crowded market.
Onboarding is where it all gets real. Really fast.
The world of SaaS is complex, and your delivery teams are the first to assess and adapt to your customers’ and company’s needs. The best way to help move this difficult transition along is to establish impeccable product delivery hygiene right at the outset.
A successful implementation means the customer’s initial objectives have been met. By treating the customer as a trusted partner throughout the process and making their project priorities your project priorities, you’ll ultimately build a mutually beneficial and strong long-term customer relationship.
Statistically, an improved implementation process can protect your SaaS revenue two years down the road. And using your software to improve operations and increase the customer’s revenue will make for a happy customer. This will help decrease your churn rate while upping revenue streams.
We take a deeper dive into how transforming your implementation process can greatly reduce churn here.
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Swift and efficient onboarding is critical to your company’s success. The best way for multiple collaborators to keep your projects on pace is to improve visibility throughout the entire delivery process AND to capture all activity in a single centralized system of record.
If all your information is saved and stored in various disparate sources—such as spreadsheets, outdated systems, email chains, or completely undocumented—there is no easy way to learn from your mistakes, build upon prior deployment experience, or help leadership understand what’s happening across your portfolio.
In many early-stage companies implementation knowledge is stored in the mind of a single onboarding manager 😬. From a long-term perspective, this or any other siloed approach is and will continue to be a major hindrance to your company’s growth.
Obviously, there is no such thing as a single, step-by-step implementation process or path for all.
Now, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to implementation. However, if a SaaS provider focuses on developing a more flexible implementation framework—the collaborative sequence common to most projects—and places those tasks within a dynamic, real-time project management portal that’s easy for all stakeholders to access, their onboarding experts will know exactly where each project stands at any given moment.
Further, they will be able to leverage historical data automatically archived at the conclusion of each project to develop new business habits that will improve subsequent onboarding processes—further reducing delays, implementation timeframes, and increasing customer satisfaction 👏. When you improve your implementation process, you improve customer outcomes.
An innovative project management tool that’s specifically built to handle the unique nuances of SaaS implementations, therefore, can help you monitor and gradually enhance your implementation “hygiene,” allowing your onboarding experts to complete more projects in significantly less time and focus on building and expanding customer relationships. As your implementation process improves, revenue growth remains on the upswing and is more likely to accelerate.
