The landscape of SaaS is exploding. With more than $157 billion in the SaaS market (more than triple what it was in 2014) there’s near-exponential opportunity. The pandemic hit the gas pedal for the industry, pushing some companies to triple-digit growth numbers.

However, rapid growth can come with increased competition. For SaaS organizations, the stakes are high, and the market is increasingly crowded and competitive.

FullStory CEO Scott Voigt and I dove into the impact of this competitive, high-stakes landscape at the recent SaaStr Enterprise conference. Here’s what we shared as we unpacked what that means for professionals in charge of product analytics and creating frictionless digital experiences.

Would you rather watch the full session? Here’s the recording.

Understanding your customers unlocks product analytics opportunities

Relentless focus on understanding customers and their needs makes you and your organization stand out from the rest.

The higher the stakes, the more rapid the growth—and the more important it is to truly know what your customers are looking for. But the ways in which companies are engaging their customers haven’t really evolved. 

Taking a traditional approach to customer analysis and engagement in a digital world doesn’t really click.

• According to Forrester, 70% of CX programs don’t go beyond surveys.

• According to Salesforce, 91% of customers who are unhappy with a brand will leave without complaining.

When Scott co-founded FullStory in 2014, he found that when asked how well they understand their users on a scale of 1 to 10, SaaS professionals reported somewhere between 2 and 3 on average. When we asked this same question to the SaaStr Enterprise audience, the average was 5.

So, what’s that mean for you? While there’s been growth in recent years, everyone’s got a long way to go. The good news is excelling at understanding your customers will put you way ahead of the pack.

Customer insights don’t have to be a nebulous, impenetrable black box. With the right tools in place, teams like yours can peek inside and uncover useful, actionable information.

We’ve drilled down to three digital insights to understand, win, and retain customers—and make your organization stand out in an increasingly crowded field of competition.

Three key SaaS insights

1.) Focus on the buyer’s journey to improve conversion

“I’ve got Google Analytics and A/B testing tools in my tech stack,” you might say. “Doesn’t that cover all my bases?” The short answer: not quite. The longer answer: those give you an idea of what is happening, but fall short with the qualitative aspect—the why. For instance, why aren’t your prospects becoming customers? The entirety of your buyer’s journey can only be understood with both halves of the equation.

For example, one customer was looking to increase app signups. Using FullStory, their team noticed a high number of Rage Clicks and dead clicks on a logo on the signup page, confusing it for something actionable.

Cutting that logo out of the page entirely yielded a 7% increase in registration completion—all because they uncovered why those clicks were happening, not just that they were.

The team at Thomas solved a similar problem, resulting in a 94% conversion rate increase. Read their case study here.

2.) Hone in on product adoption and usage insights to spur innovation and enablement

Getting users to click “enroll” or “buy” is one thing, but encouraging engagement with your product after that hurdle has been cleared is another entirely.

You need to understand the why behind what’s going on with a particular feature, flow for a unique cohort, or group of users. Again, this is where mixing quantitative and qualitative data is critically important. If you only know that someone dropped off, but don’t know why or can’t see their flow or session, you’re left without a lot of answers. Multiply that by untold numbers of locations on your website, and you could be jeopardizing revenue.

At FullStory, we practice what we preach. After launching a new product feature last year, we saw slower adoption than we would have liked. Our own digital experience intelligence surfaced issues at a certain point in the user flow and we quickly drilled down via session behavior to uncover a substantial hurdle: many users weren’t sure how to use it.

Through building, refining, and placing the training right at the point where users fall out, the team was able to drive 75% increase in successful usage of that feature in a three-month period. That’s information we wouldn’t have had if we’d relied solely on quantitative data.

3.) Extract customer engagement and support insights to retain users

While some logo churn is inevitable for companies of all sizes, that doesn’t mean working to minimize it is a lost cause. Five percent churn is the industry-wide average, but many best-in-class companies do better than that by pinpointing customer support insights and turning them into action.

Sendoso, a company that helps teams connect with customers via personalized gifts, swag, and more, uses FullStory to understand and improve customer engagement, acquisition, and retention at scale. With the FullStory platform, the team can see a stack ranking of suspected bugs, understand how many people are affected, watch session replay, and triage problems accordingly.

Read the full Sendoso case study here.

This proactive stance is one that could help any SaaS company—yours included—stem losses from preventable churn and differentiate from your competition in the process.

Take the next step

When your competition is a click away, moments matter, and every imperfect digital experience is costing your business. Keeping a focus on digital experience intelligence is what separates brands in SaaS. While the steps may be easy to understand, implementation takes work.

There’s where FullStory can help. By combining the quantitative and qualitative in real time, FullStory’s platform eliminates the blind spots in your data. Access the insights you need to perfect digital experiences and drive high-impact improvements.

Request your demo here.