Your customers don’t disappear once they’ve bought your products. They use them, review them, and sometimes come back for more. If step one of this process doesn’t go smoothly, though, steps two and three aren’t likely to go according to plan.
A crucial part of the customer journey, customer enablement ensures that those who have purchased your products or services have the information they need to maximize your product or service’s usefulness.
What is customer enablement?
Customer enablement is the strategy of equipping customers with the right tools and guidance so they can get the most out of a product (or service) and remain a customer for the long term. Building an effective customer enablement strategy is particularly important for software-as-a-service (SaaS) and business-to-business (B2B) companies, where contracts are often renewed regularly and clients require ongoing support.
Customer enablement methods vary according to your product line, goals, and customer base, but common components include customer education videos, FAQ pages, a support ticket system, and access to a learning management system.
Benefits of customer enablement
- Improves the customer experience
- Provides an avenue for valuable feedback
- Reduces your support ticket volume
Developing a thoughtful customer enablement plan requires several team members or a dedicated customer enablement manager, but it pays off in increased customer loyalty, satisfaction, and customer retention. Here are some ways this strategy can benefit your organization:
Improves the customer experience
A solid customer enablement strategy is necessary for companies that rely on a subscription model or ongoing engagement with customers to succeed. Users who learn to use your product or service quickly and easily will use it more often, for longer, and for various purposes.
For example, imagine a client bought a monthly subscription to your customer relationship management (CRM) tool and learned all its functionalities in a week, thanks to your video tutorials. They may have initially purchased it to manage customer data, but now they’re also learning how to automate email campaigns and performance reports with your tool. They’re now much more likely to purchase an annual subscription after having such a positive customer experience.
Provides an avenue for valuable feedback
Offering two-way communication channels and support improves customer satisfaction; it also allows your business to collect valuable real-world data about your product from the people who interact with it every day.
For example, let’s say you pair every client with a customer service representative who can help them learn all of your CRM tool’s capabilities. In time, you hear consistent customer feedback that the performance dashboard is difficult to share with external stakeholders. You use this feedback to improve the user experience, which in turn improves customer relationships. In this way, a well-designed customer enablement program creates a virtuous cycle of product improvement.
Reduces your support ticket volume
A good customer enablement program anticipates the needs and questions customers will have as they use and get to know a product or service. When designed well, effective customer enablement helps reduce individual support queries by answering a customer’s questions before they arise. This can save customer success teams time and resources while still ensuring customer success.
For example, you give every customer who uses your CRM tool a link to your FAQ page during the onboarding process. Instead of asking their assigned representative how to add multiple users to their account, they find their answer right away in one of the frequently asked questions.
Customer enablement tips
- Use testing data to anticipate roadblocks
- Develop a comprehensive knowledge base
- Foster customer communities
- Offer round-the-clock support
- Build opportunities for evaluation into your program
Whether you’re developing your first customer enablement plan or revamping your current one, keep these tips in mind as you build your strategy:
Use testing data to anticipate roadblocks
Any innovative product or service is bound to require some learning on the customer’s part. You can build a more effective customer enablement plan that addresses customers’ pain points by anticipating roadblocks and having solutions ready to go. Leverage beta testers to solicit and implement customer feedback before your product reaches wider audiences. Depending on your product or service, implement the following user testing methods to collect preliminary data:
- Exploratory testing. An unmoderated approach that gives you open-ended feedback on any element of your product that doesn’t work as smoothly as it should.
- Comparative testing. If you’re trying to decide between two versions of a product feature, you can use this method to determine a winner.
- Usability testing. This type of test measures the difficulty of completing a specific task.
Use the results of these tests to fill out your FAQ page, inform your first video tutorials, and train customer success managers before the hard launch of your product or service.
Develop a comprehensive knowledge base
The foundation of a good customer enablement plan is a comprehensive knowledge base—a repository of self-service resources that offer your customers information for different lifecycle stages. Common features of a knowledge base include instructional videos, help articles, FAQs, and accessible information about how to get in touch with the company to access one-on-one support.
For example, wine preservation system Coravin’s ecommerce site features an extensive product support page that provides detailed information on each of its products, including a quick start guide, features overview, and solutions to common problems.
Foster customer communities
Offering customers online spaces where they can crowdsource answers and connect with one another about your product or service can build community and nurture potential brand advocates. If you already have a highly engaged customer base, you might build a dedicated customer forum on your site where they can interact and ask questions. You can also encourage community-building elsewhere online by being active on sites like Reddit and X.
“We actually have a subreddit as a potential place for people to write,” ErgoDox EZ CEO Erez Zukerman says on an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast. Zukerman’s brand makes high-end ergonomic keyboards and has a dedicated following—so dedicated, in fact, that its fans act as ambassadors within the Reddit community, answering questions and correcting misconceptions.
This customer-to-customer communication can also be a great source of product feedback if you are upfront about your interest in collecting it. By providing channels in which customers can help each other, you may also reduce your support ticket volume.
Offer round-the-clock support
In addition to anticipating what kinds of resources and answers your customers will need, customer enablement should provide customers with the information or help they need in multiple formats. That could include training materials, such as videos and instruction manuals geared for different learning styles and multiple channels where customers can get answers quickly, whenever they need them.
Deploying an AI chatbot that can answer or triage questions a customer may have outside business hours can help provide round-the-clock customer support. Meanwhile, voice or video calls can be useful for more complex queries. Choose customer service methods that your customers are likely to use, and ensure your customer service teams are trained and armed with the necessary information to provide helpful, professional support.
That said, sometimes the best way to enable customers through support is to do it yourself. This is the approach taken by Erez. “I sit down and I reply to each and every email myself these days,” he says. “I treat people like I would like to be treated. So, somebody writes a three-page email, and I actually sit down with a cup of tea, and I read every word, and I take the time to reply, at length. People don’t often get that sort of treatment when they think of buying something.” The end result? Customers who feel more confident in their purchases and more dedicated to the brand.
Build opportunities for evaluation into your program
Effective customer enablement can not only help you refine customer experience (CX) and adjust future customer enablement tactics, but it can also drive innovation for your company’s product or service. Build industry-relevant metrics and regular evaluation time steps into your customer enablement plan from the outset. Ensure that your customer success team has touchpoints with developers and sales teams to think about ways that customer feedback can inform improvements to your product or service—and how you market it.
Customer enablement FAQ
What is the meaning of customer enablement?
Customer enablement is a strategy in which you empower customers to use your product or service comprehensively. Customer enablement tools include FAQ pages, help articles, training and demo videos, chatbots, and live customer support. Having a customer enablement strategy is particularly important for SaaS and business-to-business companies whose products require sustained engagement with the software or service.
What are the benefits of customer enablement?
Benefits of customer enablement include higher customer service ratings, improved customer satisfaction and retention, and higher adoption rates. Your loyal customers may also become brand advocates who refer your product enthusiastically to others.
What is the difference between customer enablement and customer success?
While these terms are similar, customer enablement is an approach that helps a business achieve the outcome of customer success. Customer enablement is the how, while customer success is the why. As such, you can use the terms customer enablement and customer success enablement interchangeably.
