“… there are a lot of SaaS companies building communities because the differentiator and the stickiness is moving away from just products, because products are becoming more or less similar and comparable,” Suresh Sambandam, CEO of Kissflow told ET. “What is providing stickiness is how people are building a community layer around the core of their product. If you’re not able to build that, people are switching from one software to another.”
Kissflow realised there was a lucrative opportunity in providing SaaS companies with the chance to build simple and effective communities, he said. India has over 1,000 SaaS companies and there are 30,000 globally, and one of the biggest challenges that these companies face is customer churn, he said.
Globally, 30% of SaaS companies have reported that their churn rates have increased in the past year. “We expect at least a good one-third of this churn to be arrested,” he said. “The bulk of the problems is that customers are not getting enough on-time support.”
Kissflow spoke to around 300 community professionals across the globe and found that these companies too were facing challenges in terms of customer churn in addition to not having adequate tools to address the needs of the communities.
“A product support team can support customers on the basis of technicalities and how to use the product,” Sathish Nagarajan, associate director at Kissflow Community Platform, said. “A community can actually support them on use cases, which is like having thousands of solution experts around us…that’s what makes the community more valuable for a prospect to come in.”
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