One of the reasons I’ve always loved SaaS as a business model is how it aligns the interests of vendors and customers. Before SaaS, software was a one-time purchase. Vendors collected most of their revenue upfront, with a small maintenance fee after that. It made sense for vendors to focus on making the sale because what happened to the customer afterward was a lower priority.
SaaS changed all of that. Suddenly, revenue didn’t depend on a single transaction. It depended on customers staying and expanding over years. That shift forced companies to focus on real, ongoing customer value: better products, better support, better documentation, and more listening. In other words, actually making customers successful.
I saw this firsthand at OpsGenie. We never thought of customer success as something the CS team owned alone. Engineers joined support calls. Product teams listened carefully to feedback. We shared the belief that keeping customers happy was everyone’s job. It worked. And it felt great.
But during the “free money era” of easy funding and growth-at-all-costs, that alignment got distorted. Companies chased new logos because investors rewarded that above everything else. The cost of acquisition was low, so few stopped to ask if customers were actually getting enough value to stick around.
Now, that era is over. Growth at any price isn’t enough anymore. Acquiring new customers has become much more expensive. And that means retention is critical again. But it’s not as simple as trying harder or giving the CS team more headcount. Real retention, the kind that fuels long-term growth, depends on how a company is organized and incentivized. It’s about making sure that delivering real value to customers is baked into every part of the business.
This is the new challenge for SaaS companies: returning to true customer-centricity. It’s a shift that goes beyond slogans. It means building products that genuinely solve customer problems, supporting them with empathy, and aligning every team to the mission of making customers successful.
It won’t happen overnight. But the companies that figure it out, the ones that move past the old growth-at-all-costs mindset and make retention the center of their strategy, will be the ones that thrive in this new era.
At Actioner, this is exactly what we’re focused on: giving teams the visibility and tools they need to put customers at the center again. Because retention isn’t a single department’s job. It’s everyone’s.
Explore Actioner
or book a demo to see how we support this shift.
