SaaS has become the preferred software business model today for its predictable and recurring revenue stream. The long-term success of a SaaS company depends on its ability to acquire and retain its customers for a long period of time, keeping them satisfied and coming back for more.
One of the best ways to measure customer satisfaction of your SaaS product is to directly analyze how your customers utilize your product and for what purpose. Through user behaviors, you can identify and improve your product shortcomings, enabling you to better the overall customer experience and satisfaction. The following is a list of product utilization metrics used by SaaS companies to monitor customer satisfaction.
Active Users (Daily, Monthly, Annually)
- By the ratio of active users to total users: The number of active users in proportion to the total users reflects how much your users really value or need your product.
- By session duration and visit frequency: Depending on the type of products and user roles, the active users may vary on their duration and frequency using the product. It’s important to measure and compare them to the baseline of product usage.
Your active user metrics are important to gauge the degree of user attachment to your product. Monitor these metrics over time and work on driving the metric trends upward by tweaking and making improvements on your product. As users continue to receive value from your product, they likely will stay loyal and even upgrade for more.
Product Usages
- By Features: This metric tells you the users’ most and least favorite features, reflecting their perceived value of your product. You may find features that are not being used as intended and work to improving those features.
- By Users: This metric gives you the product usage patterns by user roles, offering you insights on the product need by job positions/functions. This is invaluable in helping you position your value proposition to different customer personas.
- By Accounts: This metric gives you the product usage patterns by companies, offering you insights on the need in different industries. This can help you identify the specific use cases in various industries and target companies with similar use cases.
- By Time: This metric can help you understand whether your users have a preferred time or season to use the product. It may reveal insights to help you improve user experience.
- By Product Latency: Product latency (loading time) is highly correlated to user experience and should be optimized for better user experience.
The product usage metrics give you information on how your product is being used and offer you insights on customer experience and product issues. These metrics can deepen your understanding of your customers.
Task Activities
- By Task Completion: By tracking the various types of tasks (e.g. email sent, meeting schedule, article posted, etc.) completed inside your product, you can infer the user intention behind the task. This offers you insights on the purpose of your product from users’ point of view. If this somehow doesn’t align with the intended purpose, you should investigate why is that the case.
- By Task Not Completed: This refers to the task that has been initiated and never completed. This helps you detect if there are any tasks frequently abandoned by your users, indicating potential issues within your task process flow.
- By the number of steps per task: In general, users prefer fewer steps to accomplish a given task. Therefore, you want to make sure your users can carry out the most important tasks in as few steps as possible. If your users choose to take a longer path to accomplish a specific task, it may indicate issues with your user interface. You should optimize your product interface with this info in mind.
- By Time to Task Completion: The time it takes to complete an intended task reflect your product efficiency. This info highlights efficiency issues inside your product.
These metrics allow you to monitor whether your users are achieving their goals or not. Once you have identified places in your product that users find difficulty, you can look into updates on your products to fix bugs and/or improve user interfaces (e.g. navigation labeling, language, etc.).
Product Support
- Product support request frequency: Any request on product support indicates interruptions on user experience. The support frequency needs to be tracked and managed properly.
- Product support request intent: Users request for support for various kind of reasons, and it’s important to capture the intention behind the request. Is the request due to product bugs, unsupported functions, product stability, confusions, or for any other reasons? Regardless, you need to respond accordingly and minimize repeating request in the long run.
Product support metrics offer you direct feedback from customers, indicating product issues serious enough for customers to take actions. Product support needs to be handled with care because customers often expect quick response and resolution.
User Adoption
- Trial-to-Paid Conversion: Companies offering free trial must measure the ratio of users go from trial users to paid users. This should be triangulated with the rest of the product usage metrics to analyze for reasons not to convert.
- Free-to-Paid Conversion: Similar tot he trial-to-paid conversion, you need to measure the free-to-paid conversion and analyze for reasons not to convert.
- Time-to-first-interaction with critical features: Your users form their opinion about your product quickly, and it’s difficult to change their first impression once formed. You need to offer users value quickly, and therefore it’s important to measure how quickly they start using your most important product features. You can improve the user interface to shorten the time to the first interaction.
- Feature Abandonment: You should also measure the features that have been abandoned by your users. This metric offers you insights on the features that are either not offering value or too difficult to use. Features that have been abandoned should be removed or improved.
Your user adoption metrics are critical to the success of your product. You can obtain critical insights on how to improve your user conversion rate by tracking and analyzing all the product utilization mentioned above.
Wrap Up
Product utilization metrics are important because they reflect the perceived value of your product from the customer’s perspective. When users receive continuous value from your product, they are more likely to stay put and even refer your product to other new customers. Your product is the ultimate driver for growth because happy customers often are your most loyal advocates.
