Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) has revolutionised the way that businesses operate across the world. These subscription-based applications can help to lower operation costs while delivering high compatibility and convenience at the same time.
Thanks to this range of benefits, statistics from the product development company, DevSquad, suggest that roughly 85% of business apps will be SaaS-based by 2025, and a significant 73% of corporate representatives use SaaS products to meet their business goals.
Following such a substantial surge in demand for SaaS applications, identifying ways that your SaaS business can gain greater value from these services is key to understanding your customers, making strategic decisions, and achieving a robust Return on Investment (ROI).
Fortunately, SaaS companies have access to a significant amount of data, including user behaviour, market trends, and customer feedback, making them an invaluable source of data-driven information.
By analysing these patterns, trends, and correlations within the data, SaaS companies can gain meaningful insights and transform them into actionable and impactful outcomes.
Previously, James Disney-May has spoken about maximising ROI in SaaS using just six steps – with one of these steps referring to using data-driven insights. The entrepreneur expands upon how SaaS businesses can capitalise on these data-driven insights in more detail below.
Use analytics to predict churn
Churn is one of the key metrics that investors are interested in when deciding whether to invest in a business – and for good reason. Churn directly indicates the number of customers that end their relationship with a company over a certain period, but why is churn prediction important?
By predicting churn, you can identify why customers leave and make the necessary strategic changes to help prevent negative impacts on your revenue and profitability.
To help your SaaS company accurately predict the likelihood of customer churn, take advantage of analytics that use historical customer data and compatible machine learning algorithms. This approach should provide you with actionable insights to keep churn low.
Leverage data to identify upsell opportunities
Data can also be leveraged to develop a customer-based approach, helping your business to identify crucial upsell opportunities and proactive strategies that directly inform product decisions.
By tracking and analysing usage patterns, the performance of your SaaS products can be improved in a way that better meets user requirements. From clicks to heatmaps, all this data generates an overview of the user journey, allowing companies to enhance the product roadmap and user experience.
These improvements could be in the form of feature development or greater customer support, for example.
Analyse customer feedback to optimise SaaS products
One of the biggest benefits of SaaS solutions is that they can be constantly and quickly optimised in alignment with user feedback. This ongoing optimisation process should be driven by data derived from the regular analysis of customer feedback.
Every interaction can be collected and analysed to create an overview of customer feedback, leading to valuable insights and actionable decisions. In addition to harnessing customer feedback, SaaS companies can also utilise data to gain workforce insights and improve the employee experience.