A Revenue Management SaaS tool built on SAP had a hit product on their hands. Many large organizations run on SAP, but were having a hard time combing through ERP data for revenue opportunities. The SaaS product provided insights that reliably to revenue. Customers wanted more and company operations had to scale quickly.
Building Relationships at Scale
According to the Harvard Business School, a 5% improvement in customer retention can lead to a 25%+ increase in revenue over time. To turn this sudden growth in customers into long-term relationships, the company needs to listen to customers, respond with product improvements, reply promptly to support tickets, and be easy to work with. This sounds simple, but scaling these actions are problems at the top of mind of SaaS companies around the world.
To start, the company had built a customer portal on Salesforce Experience Cloud with the goal of giving customers a way to answer each other’s questions, create a case for support, and message their account executive.
However, the first iteration of the customer portal was not drawing as much engagement as the company team hoped.
Breaking Down the Challenge
The marketing team heard rumblings of portal issues at the annual conference, but didn’t think they were major roadblocks. The login process was different from the SaaS product itself, and the look-and-feel was inferior.
The Saas product itself was very intuitive and easy to use. With a full time UX team, even small customer requests and issues were remedied quickly. This is how the product had grown so quickly, far outpacing the usage rate of the portal.
Finding a Very Familiar Solution
Using the principles that helped the company grow into one of the most popular add-ons to SAP, marketing planned an investment in their existing customer relationships and to begin work on the portal.
The team settled on three investments:
- Make the portal look and feel like the SaaS product, as if the products were on in the same
- Instantly create customer logins to the portal during onboarding, and create a seamless login process
- Encourage customers to use the portal through fun and impactful incentives
One Solution on Salesforce Experience Cloud
To address these challenges, the client partnered with the Artichoke team to take the next step with the customer portal. Together, we completed the following:
- Engaged the existing UX team to complete new designs for the portal, and implementing the required CSS to update the portal look-and-feel
- Established SSO between the SaaS product and the customer portal
- Created customer forums, groups, and established gamification that rewarded customers with upgraded experiences at future conferences, audiences with executives, and fun SWAG
Making the Change Stick
Building momentum for the customer portal throughout the organization was critical to project success. Ultimately, the excitement for the portal drove the increase in customer participation, and this excitement was built by listening to employee and customer problems and working to solve them. Together, we saw a significant increase in customer participation in the portal, leading to happier customers and improved retention.
