5 August 2025

Here’s our practical guide to improving SaaS customer experience

Quick summary

Customer experience in SaaS directly affects activation, retention, and expansion. This guide highlights 8 practical steps to help SaaS teams improve CX using product data, journey mapping, and targeted improvements, so you can build an experience that ensures your users come back.

Why SaaS teams struggle to deliver a seamless customer experience

SaaS users expect more than just a working product; they want seamless onboarding, helpful support, and features that evolve with their needs.

But too often, teams focus on building new features without refining the experience that keeps users loyal. If you’re seeing high churn, low engagement, or inconsistent feedback, it’s time to rethink your customer experience strategy.

This TheyDo guide breaks down how to improve SaaS customer experience step by step. You’ll learn how to spot what’s broken, fix it fast, and build a journey that’s easy, helpful, and hard to leave.

Why listen to us

At TheyDo, we help leading SaaS companies like Atlassian and Webfleet Solutions fix friction, reduce churn, and align teams around what customers truly need. Our platform turns scattered insights into clear, coordinated action, making customer satisfaction a shared responsibility and driving experience-led growth.

What is SaaS customer experience?

Customer experience (CX) is the overall feeling customers have when interacting with your SaaS product. It spans every touchpoint from signing up and onboarding to using features, getting support, and renewing subscriptions.

Unlike just focusing on product features, CX looks at the full journey and how it shapes trust, loyalty, and long-term value. Understanding customer experience means seeing your service through your users’ eyes and designing every step to make their lives easier.

Why good SaaS customer experience matters

Reduce churn: Identify where onboarding or support falls short so you can remove blockers and keep users from leaving your product.
Increase retention and loyalty: Build consistent, reliable experiences that earn trust and keep users coming back and telling others.
Improve efficiency across teams: Give product, support, and success teams shared visibility into customer pain points to fix problems faster.
Focus on what drives results: Prioritize improvements where frustration is highest to improve adoption, satisfaction, and long-term usage.
Make smarter, customer-led decisions: Link user feedback directly to journey stages so teams know exactly where to act and why.

How to improve SaaS customer experience

Step 1: Start with clear CX goals and internal alignment

Improving SaaS customer experience doesn’t begin with more features; it starts with clarity. If your team isn’t aligned on what needs to improve and why, even the best tools won’t help.

So, start by setting customer-focused goals that are specific, measurable, and tied to business outcomes.

For example, instead of setting ambiguous goals like “increase satisfaction,” try:

Reduce first-week churn by 15%
Raise onboarding completion rates to 90%
Cut average resolution time for support tickets by 30%

Once goals are defined, ensure every team involved in the user experience understands their role in achieving them.

Create shared visibility using:

A central workspace showing CX goals tied to metrics
Dashboards where each team sees how their work impacts the journey
Clear handoff points, so users don’t fall through the cracks

TheyDo’s goal framework makes this easier by linking each customer goal directly to the journeys and initiatives they affect. That way, teams can connect daily work to broader CX outcomes without the usual silos or guesswork.

To get everyone on board with improving customer experience, show how it helps the business in ways they already care about. For example:

Clearer onboarding means more trial users become paying customers
Fewer support issues give developers more time to build new features
Happier users are more likely to tell their friends about your product

When everyone sees what matters and why, progress starts to compound.

Step 2: Map the end-to-end user journey

Mapping the full SaaS user journey gives you a clear, shared picture of how users interact with your product from the moment they discover it to after they’ve subscribed.

But many SaaS teams make the mistake of only mapping the smooth path. The real insight lies in the drop-offs, delays, and frustrations users face along the way.

Start with phases, not features. Break the journey into meaningful phases like

Awareness: Where users first learn about your product
Evaluation: When they sign up for a trial or explore pricing
Onboarding: First time in the product, activation steps
Adoption: Regular usage, exploring core features
Support & Escalation: When things go wrong
Renewal or Churn: The decision to stay or leave

For each stage, ask:

What are users trying to achieve here?
What touchpoints do they interact with (email, product UI, docs, human support)?
What’s working? What’s broken?

Tools like TheyDo’s customer journey framework let teams visualize and structure these journeys collaboratively. This helps expose blind spots, especially where internal assumptions don’t match real user behavior.

Step 3: Connect user behavior and feedback to journey steps

Mapping the journey is only useful if you connect it to what users are actually doing and saying.

Start by pulling data from across your stack, analytics, support tickets, churn surveys, and onboarding drop-offs, and tie those signals to specific steps in the journey.

For example, if 40% of users abandon onboarding before completing setup, highlight that point in the journey map.

This transforms the journey map from a mere diagram into a dynamic source of truth that shows where customer experience (CX) contains friction and the reasons behind it.

Use insights like:

Click paths and session recordings to see confusion in real time
CSAT and NPS by journey stage to measure satisfaction at key points
Support volumes to spot hidden blockers or unclear flows

With TheyDo’s opportunity tagging, teams can link every data point to a specific step.

This avoids vague feedback like “users are confused” and replaces it with clarity, such as “70% of users drop off at the pricing screen after failing to select a plan.”

With this level of precision, your team gets the direction they need to take action faster and make every fix count.

Step 4: Spot friction and experience gaps across touchpoints

Following the precision from the previous step, the next action is to zoom in on where things break down. These are the moments that frustrate users and quietly push them toward churn.

Start by reviewing each journey step through the lens of actual user actions and complaints. Then look for patterns in behavior and feedback that signal discomfort.

For example,:

Users pausing or abandoning a task mid-way
Increased support tickets about a specific step or feature
Repeated actions that suggest confusion, like toggling between tabs or reloading a page
Low feature adoption despite clear need or demand

To identify these gaps, combine behavioral analytics (e.g., drop-off rates, session replays) with qualitative inputs (e.g., user feedback, support conversations). Then link each finding to the exact step in the journey it affects.

For example, let’s say your analytics show a 40% drop-off during the “Connect CRM” step in your product. Session replays show users toggling between tabs or refreshing the page. Meanwhile, support tickets mention confusing setup instructions.

When you connect these signals to the journey, it becomes clear that this step needs clearer instructions.

Finally, document these issues clearly;

Label each one by journey phase
Describe the trigger (what causes the issue), and
Capture the user’s likely feeling (e.g., frustrated, unsure, delayed).

This makes it easier for cross-functional teams to align on what needs fixing.

TheyDo’s Journey AI simplifies this. It transforms raw customer data into actionable insights by mining, enriching, and summarizing feedback across journeys, so you can identify opportunities and enhance CX.

Step 5: Segment users to personalize the experience

Your users don’t always share the same goals, habits, or levels of product understanding. Some log in daily and rely on your tool to do their job. Others show up once a week and need reminders or hand-holding. If you treat them the same, some may feel ignored, while some may feel overwhelmed.

That’s where segmentation helps. Group users based on behavior, role, or lifecycle stage, then tailor the experience accordingly.

Start with meaningful segments: Group users by usage frequency, feature adoption, company size, or onboarding completion.
Map these groups to journey stages: Identify where each group tends to drop off, succeed, or need support.
Spot unmet needs: New users might get stuck during onboarding. Older users may want advanced support or feature previews.
Tailor your touchpoints:
- Send simplified guides to low-frequency users
- Offer in-app tips for specific roles (like admins vs. contributors)
- Trigger check-ins based on behavior (e.g., no logins in 30 days)

When you make the journey feel relevant for each segment, users are more likely to succeed and stay.

Tools like TheyDo let you connect customer personas directly to journeys, so teams can compare how each group moves through the experience. When you understand what matters to different segments, you can design improvements that drive results.

Step 6: Prioritize actions that drive impact

Once you've identified where users struggle, the next step is choosing what to fix first. You cannot fix everything at once, so focus on improvements that will make the biggest difference.

Start by listing every friction point or opportunity you’ve uncovered, whether from behavior data, feedback, or interviews. Then, score each one using three simple filters:

Customer value: Will solving this significantly improve the experience?
Business value: Will it help increase retention, reduce support costs, or drive upsells?
Effort required: Is this a quick fix or a complex system overhaul?

To keep things simple, assign a score from 1 to 5 for each area. Add up the value scores and subtract the effort. The higher the result, the more attractive the fix.

Plot your results on a basic 2x2 grid to sort them into:

Quick wins: High value, low effort
Strategic bets: High value, high effort
Low priority: Low value or high effort

This helps you stay focused on what matters. You can learn more about how to prioritize opportunities with this guide. You can start by scoring each opportunity using TheyDo’s built-in framework.

Step 7: Assign ownership and track progress continuously

Good ideas need to be executed to drive impact. In SaaS, customer experience issues often get ignored because no one is responsible.

To turn plans into results, assign a specific owner to each fix and track progress where everyone can see it.

Start by giving each action item:

Assign a specific owner, not just a team, but one person accountable for making the change happen
Link the action to a journey step so it’s clear exactly where it fits and what it’s meant to improve
Set a clear deadline or check-in date to keep things moving and avoid stalled efforts

Keep everything in one place where everyone can track updates. Use your project tools or a journey mapping platform like TheyDo to:

Filter tasks by product area, segment, or goal
Track what’s in progress and what’s complete
Comment directly on issues tied to journey steps

When teams clearly understand the tasks at hand and their motivations, it fosters alignment and accountability among all members.

Step 8: Test, measure, and improve

SaaS products evolve, and so do customer expectations. What works today might cause churn tomorrow. That’s why teams need a habit of testing, measuring, and improving continuously.

Start small. Instead of overhauling full workflows, make targeted changes to individual journey steps. For example:

Update onboarding emails to reduce confusion
Rework tooltips or UI flows that cause drop-offs
Rewrite renewal reminders to improve clarity

After each change, measure the effect using CX metrics that match the journey stage:

Onboarding: Time to value, activation rate, trial-to-paid conversion
Product adoption: Feature usage depth, login frequency, session duration
Support: Ticket volume, resolution time, CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score)
Retention: Renewal rate, churn rate, number of at-risk accounts
Advocacy: NPS (Net Promoter Score), referral rate, customer review count

These metrics tell you not just what changed, but where to focus next.

Lastly, listen for customer signals. Use NPS comments, survey responses, or live chat logs to spot how people feel before numbers shift.

Keep tracking all these variables by journey step, not just by department. That way, teams can connect improvements to real outcomes.

Deliver better SaaS customer experience with TheyDo

Great features attract users, but exceptional experiences retain them. TheyDo helps SaaS teams move beyond isolated fixes and build a system for consistent, user-led improvement.

From onboarding to retention, everyone gets a shared view of where customers struggle, what matters most, and how to fix it fast and together.

When your entire team can act on CX insights with clarity and purpose, you turn everyday decisions into long-term growth.