Scaling your SaaS platform for larger audience while offering Personalization

SaaS has made it possible for companies to cater to a large number of clients through its web-based delivery mode. With the help of multi-tenancy-based infrastructure and application-sharing architecture, SaaS has unlocked economies of scale.

In order to serve as many clients as possible, SaaS applications are embedded with highly scalable functionalities. This has become one of the major reasons more and more businesses are migrating to SaaS. But, standardization can only work to a certain extent, because every business is different, and therefore many clients end up needing function variants that address their unique needs through easy configuration and personalization.??

How can SaaS platforms be personalized?

Here’s where the design comes into the picture. SaaS platforms need to have a sound and long-term design strategy to enable self-serve configuration and customization by their customers without changing the SaaS application source code for any individual customer.?

Let’s say we are designing a reimbursement approval workflow. Though the need for such a feature is prevalent across different levels of clients (small firms, SMEs, and large corporates), the hierarchy involved in getting approval might vary for different clients.?

For one client, the workflow can be designed for the reimbursement request of any $X amount, the employee just needs to get approval from his/her Project manager. Another client may require a different workflow where for a $1000 request, one needs approval from the Project Manager, and for a $5000 amount, the approval needs to come from a higher up, etc. It’s very important to know how many personas that we are addressing in this workflow.

Personalization for each persona is important in SaaS because it can help your users hit their goals faster. It is especially effective at driving repeat engagement and loyalty over time. Next in Personalization 2021 Report reveals that companies who excel at demonstrating customer intimacy generate faster rates of revenue growth than their peers.

The importance of scalability for a SaaS platform

A SaaS platform needs scalability as an integral element at its core. A SaaS platform is considered scalable when it doesn’t need to be redesigned to maintain effective performance during or after a steep increase in workload. This workload can refer to number of users, number of tasks, storage capacity etc.?

Building a scalable platform paves the way for future growth while creating a platform that caters to user needs.?

Why a SaaS platform must be both Scalable and Personalized:

Truth is, as the SaaS platform grows and more features are added, complexity of the platform evolves; making it difficult to diagnose problems on an on-going basis. And, Some businesses fail to prioritize scalability and personalization because they don’t see the immediate utility of it. The most important attributes of a SaaS platform gets pushed aside in favor of speed, shorter development cycles, or lower cost.

Prioritizing scalability is the business need whereas personalization is your user needs which means neither of them can be ignored. If a SaaS platform is designed in such a way that it accommodates multiple workflows that cater to different kinds of clients, while solving their custom business requirements, that’s when it achieves both customization and scalability.