4/PLG Self Service Series: Tenant lifecycle
4/PLG Self Service Series: Tenant lifecycle
Lets dig through - Why is Tenant Lifecycle Management important for PLG businesses?
Tenant Management forms a crucial bridge between seamless user experiences and the efficient functioning of your application. In our previous blog, we delved into the significance of user transitions. In this installment, we explore the intricate relationship between these transitions and the concept of tenants in a SaaS ecosystem.
Welcome to the world where each customer is more than just a user; they're a tenant in your application. It ensures that each customer using the SaaS application has their own private and secure space within the system, allowing them to customize and use the software independently without interfering with other customers' data and settings. This approach allows SaaS providers to serve a large number of customers simultaneously while maintaining a high level of security and scalability.
Tenant Management is difficult for PLG products
In the early days of their product’s PLG journey, most SaaS products saw a drop-off of ~98% of users. Cloud computing costs went through the roof as each signup spun off a heavy backend tenant infrastructure
- 85% of SaaS Builders surveyed (n=75) reported tooling and technologies not available for PLG self-serve
Largely speaking, there are 3 tenancy models. Single Tenant, Mixed Tenant, and Multi-Tenant. When it comes to scalable SaaS products, most startups choose a multi-tenant architecture. The tenant lifecycle in the context of a SaaS platform refers to the various stages that a customer (tenant) goes through during their journey with the platform.
Let's explain each stage:
End User Service Agreement (EUSA)
When implementing a self-serve model, the EUSA is often presented to users during the signup or registration process. This is the initial phase where the potential customer reviews and accepts the End-User Service Agreement or Terms of Service provided by the SaaS platform. It outlines the contractual terms, conditions, and rules under which the customer will use the platform. Users agree to it during signup, ensuring a clear and trustworthy relationship between both the service provider and the end-users
Tenant Creation
After accepting the EUSA, the customer (tenant) creates an account on the SaaS platform. During this phase, the customer provides the necessary information, such as name, email, company details, etc., to set up their unique tenant account.
Tenant Waitlist
In certain scenarios, a SaaS platform may experience high demand, and resources might be limited. In such cases, the platform may implement a waitlist for new customers who want to sign up. The waitlist ensures a fair and organized onboarding process, allowing the platform to manage the influx of new tenants effectively.
Tenant Enrichment (aka Segmentation)
Once the tenant account is created, the SaaS platform may collect additional information about the customer, such as firmographic Company information, and/or industry-specific data. This data helps enrich the customer profile and allows the platform to segment customers based on specific characteristics. Imagine attributes like - Industry vertical, Number of employees, HQ location, Publicly listed/Private, Website, Twitter/LinkedIn handle, etc.
Tenant Transition
Tenant Transitions are defined as the changes of state affected by changes due to Pricing Plans, and adding/removing Business units. Successfully managing tenant transitions ensures that as your users' needs evolve, your SaaS product can adapt and scale to accommodate these changes seamlessly.
But what makes this transition even smoother and more efficient?
In the PLG world, life of a Tenant should generally starts small, changes its shape and form (e.g. additional access & features) and can be acquire/merge with other Tenants to represent a large Customer.
e.g. Think that a BU within General Electric bought a SaaS product, and then later on it gets viral and deployed to other BUs.
The answer lies in the strategic implementation of micro tenants.
Designing with micro-tenants can simplify tenant transitions. Whether users are moving from individual accounts to team-based settings or scaling up to enterprise-level configurations, tenant transitions allow for a tailored, personalized experience at every step.
Dunning
In the SaaS context, dunning refers to the process of managing failed or overdue payments from customers. SaaS platforms typically handle this by sending automated notifications to customers about payment failures, reminding them to update their billing information, or resolving any issues with their subscriptions.
Clean Up
Over time, customer data may become unnecessary to hold and needs to be deleted. e.g. Free Trial ended and the customer dropped off usage, Paid customers may have churned (canceled/discontinued their subscriptions). The clean-up stage involves regularly reviewing and managing the tenants, removing inactive or canceled accounts, deleting associated users, notifying admins as necessary, and updating relevant records to keep the platform's data accurate and up-to-date.
Engagement lifecycle Initiation
The engagement lifecycle within the tenant lifecycle typically begins once the tenant has completed the initial onboarding and activation stages. While the tenant lifecycle generally encompasses all stages from the initial sign-up to the continued use or churn of a customer, the engagement lifecycle focuses on the ongoing interactions and experiences that drive customer satisfaction, loyalty, and value realization
But there's more to this story, and we're excited to announce that our next blog will be entirely dedicated to dissecting the intricacies of the Engagement Lifecycle.
Related :
2/PLG Self-Service Series: Implementation Considerations
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This was a very informative article about the lifecycle stages of a tenant and technical considerations to think about throughout. As a startup scales and usage grows, the team will need to grow as well to support some of these maintenance and operational related tasks. Often startups are budget constrained and need to manage human capital cost wisely. But these operational tasks are very real and can consume time of engineers who would otherwise be building new value add capabilities.