What does CS look like for self-service, low ARPU SaaS solutions?

[Deleted User] · 2022-05-18T09:34:15+00:00

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I'm the Cofounder and CEO of a growing, non-venture backed startup (eWebinar). I say non-venture backed because it's important to note that we don't have much resources, and every dollar we spend has to be super intentional.

eWebinar is a self-service, low ARPU ($50-250/month) SaaS solution. We're a super small team and all our post sales onboarding and training is delivered via eWebinar (automated webinars) and a massive HubSpot knowledge base.

My previous company was an enterprise solution where customers were super high-touch so CS was much simpler and straight forward as it almost always involved 1on1 touch base calls.

eWebinar is my 3rd startup but the first one that's truly self-service without account managers.

I'm curious as to what CS programs look like for companies like mine where it doesn't make financial sense to put people on 1on1 calls.

What are the important metrics to measure? What tech stack do you use to implement your program? How do you determine customer touch points and what types of content do you deliver to them?

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[Deleted User]

Hey @Ian Remington , I really appreciate your response! I'm curious to learn more about your product and how you guys feed customers through the journey you just described, as well as what you measure, and how you determine who to send what to. I'll DM you!

Ian Remington

Hey Melissa,

We're also in an SMB space and ~30-40% of our accounts receive dedicated 1:1 onboarding with even less (10%) receiving a dedicated CSM.

We have definitely looked to automate as much of the implementation process as possible but certainly have a long ways to go. We use a tool similar to the one it sounds like you have co-founded (Demio) and host pre-recorded webinars daily on the implementation side. We have our sales team hand-off customers to these webinars and will even include these courses on their initial contract (written off) to indicate the value of what their receiving. We don't measure as much as we should for what this does for adoption but do track attendance and send post session surveys.

Once the customer is out of this 2 week courses, we continue with different and more targeted pre-recorded sessions and also leverage an LMS. We have also very much looked to automate as much as we can on the Support side through our Help Center and our team has a recurring goal around automation content creation (bots, help articles, saved reply templates, etc) to ensure we're continually creating more and more content to help customers self serve and adopt.

I would be happy to chat with you more to both learn from you and share a bit more as to what we've had successes with and what we have not.

[Deleted User]

@Jeffrey Kushmerek thank you for taking the time to respond!

I'd love to dive into what you mean by this statement: You will need to be able to see the intersections of training, usage, and product features.

If you're open to a quick call, I'd be very grateful!

We don't have an LMS (our solution is simple and don't need this, and we're too small to afford it). Our solution, eWebinar, actually is the platform that delivers training and onboarding on autopilot (we automate webinars with videos). So a number of companies actually use us as a pseudo-LMS as we are much more light weight and affordable + asynch chat.

Jeffrey Kushmerek

Hi Melissa,

For customers at that price range, a digital (no touch) customer journey will be essential. You seem to have this with your onboarding and training being delivered digitally.

For your scenario, CS ops is essential. You will need to be able to see the intersections of training, usage, and product features. Once you have that data, you will need to feed either a marketing type of campaign or have that be when you have a team member reach out. This was you are proactively addressing low usage, training pieces not working, etc.

For a tech stack, do you have an LMS to deliver the training and make sure people are getting through the training? From there, you should have some type of CS platform/dashboard to see the customers at risk based on the factors above.

Happy to chat more about this!

Jeff