In today's competitive business landscape, customers derive value from the tangible aspect of the product. With so many SaaS and B2B services in the market, a notable difference can be seen between what customers are promised and what is delivered.
The misalignment in promises and outcomes frustrated customers and damaged the business's reputation. When customers do not find the promised value in the product, they start to look for alternatives, resulting in a lost customer for the business.
Therefore, bridging this gap between promise and outcome is immensely important, and this is where customer enablement comes into play. Customer enablement helps businesses fully optimize the product or service that customers are receiving to drive success.
There needs to be a proactive approach where customer success managers provide customers with what they need. In this article, we will explore various aspects of customer enablement and how it helps businesses move towards success.
Customer enablement is a crucial driver of success in B2B sales by bridging the gap between product promises and what customers are actually getting. Businesses can enhance satisfaction and loyalty by empowering customers with knowledge and tools.
This also fosters long-term client relationships and helps the company achieve its strategic goals. Before diving into more details, let us look at customer enablement.
Customer enablement focuses on equipping customers with the skills, resources, and tools needed to use products and services. This approach is important for the business's success, as it enhances customer experience and fosters long-term relationships.
By providing customers with the means that can help them fully utilize the product or service, businesses can create more loyal customers who are not only to just use the product and service again and again but also spread positive things about your brand to other people.
At its core, customer enablement is delivering tools, templates, and any other type of resources to your clients that maximize the value of the investment that they have made with your business. The resources can be video guidelines, brochures with instructions, guides, or webinars to address the common challenges regarding your products and services.
The training programs that businesses conduct with the clients, especially if the product is technical in nature, also count as a part of the customer success enablement strategy. If you want increased customer retention and enhanced brand image, customer enablement is your way to go about things.
Customer enablement strategy is important because it goes way beyond traditional customer success activities. The importance of customer enablement strategy is covered below in the following points.
Empower Customers: A well-executed customer enablement strategy ensures that customers use the product to its full potential. Such a strategy will empower customers, and there is a higher chance that there will be increased customer retention.
Drive Customer Advocacy: The ultimate goal of customer enablement is to drive business growth. It is important for growth, as satisfied customers advocate for your business, spreading positive word of mouth.
Proactive Support: Customer enablement strategies focus on proactive support rather than reactive. This means you are addressing potential issues for your customers and providing them with the solutions in advance. This lifts the work burden on the customer success managers.
Support Revenue Models: For companies that rely on critical revenue models such as subscription-based models, customer enablement is very important. It is important to make your customers realize the value that your business is offering so they can find purpose in investing in your product or service.
While both processes, customer enablement, and customer support enablement, are important for the success of a business, they differ in their objectives and what they want to achieve.
Customer Enablement equips your customers with the right tools and resources to fully utilize the product and service they are investing in. When customers can successfully use the product, they are likelier to stay with the business. It invovles the training programs, and the resources targetted to help customers only.
When we talk about Customer Support Enablement, it is the tools and resources that you equip your customer support team with. Providing the right tools to your support team is a key driver to business growth because only then your support team will be able to assist and guide customers wherever they need help. This includes providing the support team extensive training about product usage or the knowledge base from which to extract information.
Both processes are equally important for business, as a lack of these can impact how customers view your business. Make the right blend of resources provided to customers and support teams to achieve high-quality assistance and maximize product value.
You can deliver both trainings using a learning management system (LMS), which will teach customers how to use the product and provide the customer support team with the skills and resources needed to assist customers.
Customer and sales enablement strategies are equally important for business success, but they focus on different aspects of the customer journey and have distinct objectives.
Sales enablement is equipping your sales team with the necessary tools and resources that they will need to maximize revenue and achieve sales targets. It involves providing the sales team with training and content to engage potential customers and address their needs to close the deals.
A sales enablement strategy is required very early in the customer journey when the customer is at a decision-making stage.
Customer enablement is focused on boosting customer loyalty, but sales enablement is focused on optimizing sales and driving revenue growth. It is about equipping the sales team with tools that convert customers and lock deals.
While you will require a customer enablement strategy at the later stages of the customer journey, sales enablement will be required in the stages where you can convert prospects into paying customers.
Customer enablement has various benefits and we have covered all these benefits in detail below.
One of the primary benefits is to increase the product adoption rate. The more the users know about the product's utility, the more they will accept it. If many customers adopt the product, it is easier to integrate it into workflows.
This product integration leads to an immediate adoption of the product and ensures that users engage with the product on a deeper level. A higher adoption rate is directly related to increased sales and new subscriptions.
Customer satisfaction also highly depends on how well you equip your customers with tools and resources. By providing tailored resources, businesses can offer a personalized experience to their clients. This customized approach helps users comprehensively understand the product or service.
When customers feel they are being supported and valued, their satisfaction rises, increasing customer loyalty. Satisfied customers are more likely to become your brand promoters and further help drive business growth.
Effective customer enablement also allows businesses to reduce the burden of support teams. You need to educate customers, and can significantly lower the volume of support tickets you receive. This optimization frees up resources for the support team.
Empowered customers can easily navigate through things and utilize the products to their full potential. Satisfied customers are then able to drive business growth and contribute to the revenue.
You can follow the following simple steps to develop a customer enablement strategy for your business.
The first step of your strategy is to identify the goals and objectives you are aiming to achieve. Once the objectives are identified, you can only work towards them and tailor your strategy according to them. You might want to reduce the churn rate, boost customer satisfaction, or foster loyalty.
By having well-defined goals, you can align your customer enablement strategy with your business strategy. This alignment of goals will drive meaningful outcomes for your business.
To gauge the effectiveness of your strategy, it is important to identify and establish key performance indicators (KPIs). These metrics will help you measure the success of your initiative. NPS (Net Promoter Scores), product usage, and adoption rates are common KPIs that gauge customer satisfaction.
By regularly monitoring the KPIs, you can gain customer feedback on how well your strategy is performing. There will be no use in implementing a strategy if you can't keep track of the progress. You also cannot work toward the betterment or make any adjustments in your strategy without KPIs.
Once you have goals and KPIs, the next step is to develop a comprehensive plan. The plan should outline the strategies, initiatives, and tactics you will use to empower your customers. Consider creating a mix of tutorials, resources, and tools to transfer to your customers.
Establish a timeline to allocate these resources so their use can be optimized. Make sure to create resources that cater to the unique needs of different customer segments. A well-thought-out plan ensures that all aspects of customer support are covered, leading to a cohesive strategy.
It is also important to highlight the specific role of customer success teams in the enablement strategies.
Customer success enablement teams are at the frontline of this entire strategy. They must ensure that customers effectively use the product or service to achieve the final goals.
By collaborating closely with customer success enablement teams, businesses can directly understand the challenges and needs in the enablement strategy. This approach helps the customer success enablement teams maximize the value customers derive from the products.
Customer success enablement teams are a great way and a valuable source to get feedback and insights to improve customer enablement strategy. Customer success enablement teams can provide businesses with firsthand information on user experience and common pain points through customer interactions.
By leveraging this feedback, businesses can better address customers' specific needs. Customer feedback from customer success enablement teams also highlights the trends and patterns that might not be evident and allows companies to refine their products and services.
Following are the best practices you can keep in mind while devising or implementing the enablement strategy.
One of the best practices is to give customers a personalized onboarding experience and interactive product walkthroughs. This walkthrough will be very specific to the customer journey, where you will guide them step by step about the product features.
The personalized approach ensures that your customers feel engaged with the business on a deeper level. You should also try to make the onboarding process smoother and encourage hands-on exploration with the product. The interactive onboarding and learning methods also empower the users and make them proficient.
Another best practice is to build an in-app center that serves as a centralized hub for information. This resource center can provide customers easy access to all material, tutorials, and FAQs needed for the training process.
Using these resources, users can quickly find answers to questions, troubleshoot issues, and get proactive support, saving users time and reducing their dependency on the customer success team.
If you are a business following an enablement strategy, you must be facing some common challenges. We have covered how to overcome these challenges and also measure success.
Implementing enablement strategy can get a little tricky for businesses such as lack of adequate tools or unclear processes might be a hindrance. Such a lack of tools can hinder the process's overall efficiency and impact the seamlessness of customer experience.
Unclear processes can also create confusion, impacting both the internal team and the client. Addressing these challenges and making sure that you have the right tools and technology to implement an enablement strategy is very important. Having a clear process also helps in the smooth implementation of the process.
Measuring the success of your strategy is also very important because it helps in continuous improvement. You will get an idea of how your customers feel about the product, and you can eventually use these insights to improve your processes.
There should also be resource optimization metrics, such as noticing how much support tickets have been reduced due to the enablement strategy. The overall metrics also capture the effectiveness and efficiency of the strategies.
Continuous improvement is the key to a successful business strategy. You should regularly keep a check on customer feedback and make sure to incorporate it while making improvements.
This will also make your decision-making customer-centric, and your strategy will remain effective, relevant, and aligned with the final business goals.
In conclusion, customer enablement is not just about providing support but empowering customers to succeed with your products or services. Businesses can enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty by following best practices like personalized onboarding, creating communities for sharing knowledge, and leveraging technology for effective support. If you are looking for tools to support your business goals, do not forget to have a look at JustReply.
