This week the Apptension 2024 SaaS Report was published and we have some thoughts. This report is based on a survey with 400 respondents from across the SaaS sector in Europe. It gives some insight into the perceived challenges and investment opportunities that will impact the future of SaaS and this massively fast-growing sector.
As a business that sits within the SaaS sector we are incredibly interested in the projections that have surfaced through this report and within this blog we will give our thoughts.
Data security is a key pressure point
Data security was the biggest challenge identified by respondents for the SaaS industry for 2024, with over 75% acknowledging the importance of a focus on data security.
The acknowledgment of the heightened risks and complexities involved in safeguarding sensitive information within cloud-based environments persists. In these digital settings, data breaches can lead to significant repercussions and a loss of trust in an organisation. The respondents of this survey seem to agree that mitigating these risks is one of the key areas of focus in 2024.
We recognise the importance of data security implications within our organisation as we handle not only personal data, but record and analyse sensitive data through our surveys. The importance of maintaining and emphasising our high standards of data security within our platform and organisation as a whole is intrinsic to building and fostering enduring trust between ourselves and our clients.
Platform scalability and the support to go with it
Of the respondents to this survey, 19% responded that platform scalability was the biggest challenge to expect in 2024, and 16% voted for customer retention. Although on the face of it these challenges seem separate, in practice they go hand in hand, ideally scaling your SaaS platform will be a response to increasing new users whilst also retaining clients.
Scalability on a platform level involves ensuring that architecture can handle increased loads, efficient load balancing and strategies for resource allocation to ensure platform performance and customer experience is not impacted during periods of expansion and growth. This can be achieved through scalable cloud infrastructures, that give not only the flexibility for expansion but options to reallocate resources dynamically.
However, with this in mind SaaS platforms need to retain existing clients in order to reach their growth goals. Here, the most problematic areas include maintaining high service quality, ensuring customer satisfaction and continuously adding value.
At Culture15, maintaining the relationships we have built with our existing clients is just as important as creating new connections. Central to this is communication, through regular communication we are able to not only foster these relationships but have our clients actively involved in how the platform continues to develop. By releasing new features regularly- features that our clients want- our platform remains ahead of the curve when considering retention…and is growing accordingly.
Is AI the future of SaaS?
Almost 94% of those surveyed believe that AI will play a larger role in SaaS products by 2024, it is considered as one of the most impactful trends to watch in the coming year. AI has the ability to transform the SaaS sector, with efficiency gains, smarter solutions and innovative service offerings which can completely redefine the industry.
AI is also set to redefine the user experience of these platforms with increased provision for advanced data analytics and AI decision-making, Personalisation capabilities and more sophisticated customer interaction tools will not only enhance the deliverable value of the platform but also the user satisfaction.
At Culture15 we have already implemented some AI provision into our platform for the sentiment analysis of large verbatim data sets. The value of this is immeasurable in aiding our time-poor clients harness the value of qualitative data by highlighting comments by sentiment. As our platform is ever developing our AI capabilities are also growing, we aim to use AI even further to give more in depth analytics and insight.
Conclusion
2024 is proving already to be a year of growth, change and innovation for the SaaS industry. This report gives some insight into the future of SaaS and expected trends and challenges to come and encouragingly we seem to be ahead of the curve of many of the upcoming developments. We will continue to monitor and work through these challenges and trends throughout 2024 and beyond.
Image credit: Carlos Muza
Culture15 is your complete toolkit for tracking culture change. CEOs and Exec Teams at world-leading organisations use Culture15 analytics to ensure success by aligning their culture with what they need to execute their strategy. If you’d like to find out how to define the culture and values you need, diagnose the culture you have and close the gap, talk to our team.
