What is Customer Enablement? A Guide For B2B SaaS Products And Services

If you want loyal customers who keep coming back to your product or service, you need customer enablement.

Having a great product just isn’t enough anymore. Instead, you also have to help customers get the maximum value from it.

That’s exactly what effective customer enablement does – it helps customers get all the tools needed for successful product engagement.

But what exactly is customer enablement and what are some best practices to achieve customer success? Let’s find out.

TL;DR

• Customer enablement includes all the steps you take to provide customers with a positive experience so they can derive maximum value from your product or service.
• Increased customer satisfaction and retention rate, along with greater customer loyalty and company growth, are just some of the benefits of an effective customer enablement strategy.
• Customer enablement and sales enablement aren’t the same. Customer success enablement focuses on providing customers with the necessary tools for success. Sales enablement focuses on equipping your sales team with essential resources to help improve customer acquisition.
• Here are some tried-and-tested best practices for customer enablement:
  1. Introduce personalized onboarding to guide and educate customers from the get-go.
  2. Use interactive walkthroughs to highlight the benefits of specific features.
  3. Provide in-app customer support resources so users can troubleshoot and find solutions instantly.
  4. Start collecting customer feedback to uncover user likes and dislikes.
• To put all these best practices to use, we suggest the following strategies:
  1. Welcome screens to collect data to be used in designing personalized onboarding.
  2. Trigger in-app CSAT surveys to collect feedback on the spot.
  3. Set up onboarding checklists to make the process smoother for new users.
• Product growth tools such as Userpilot can help you unlock more value for your customers with interactive walkthroughs, onboarding checklists, product analytics, and more.

What is customer enablement?

Customer enablement is the process of empowering customers with the necessary skills, resources, and tools they need to use your products and services successfully. The end goal of any customer enablement strategy is to provide a positive customer experience.

Focusing on customer enablement helps improve product adoption and bring in long-term growth.

The benefits of having a customer enablement strategy

If done right, customer enablement will improve your customer retention by increasing referrals and converting your customers into brand advocates.

We will dive deeper into even more benefits below, such as more satisfied customers and greater growth.

Increase customer satisfaction

When customers feel like your product isn’t providing the value it promised, they’re simply going to churn. But you can put an end to that.

If you enable customers with the right resources, they will be able to unlock maximum value, as promised. This will help lead to higher customer satisfaction, which means customers will use your product more often.

Improve customer retention

Improved satisfaction translates into repeat product usage. The more repeated value customers derive, the longer they will stick around because you’re giving them everything they expect.

In other words, this means higher retention powered by improved customer support and value generation.

Higher customer loyalty and growth

The pinnacle of success for all companies is having your loyal customers become trusty brand advocates. With a successful customer enablement strategy in place, you can easily achieve this goal.

Increased customer retention means customers choose your product over all others, which is another way of saying they’re loyal. Greater loyalty leads to greater growth because loyal customers advocate for the brand through word-of-mouth marketing.

Moreover, since customers will stick around for longer, this also means you’re increasing your customer lifetime value.

Customer success enablement vs sales enablement

The end goal of both customer enablement and sales enablement is the same: to ensure customer success and excellent customer service. However, the two are very different strategies and should not be confused with each other.

Customer success enablement or customer enablement focuses on your customer. It involves all the steps you take to help your customer thrive with your product or service.

This includes everything from offering in-depth product guides to offering accessible support from customer success managers. Customer success strategies require analyzing metrics such as retention and lifetime value.

As opposed to this, sales enablement strategies are centered around your sales teams. Here, the aim is to provide key resources and data to help the team perform effectively to improve acquisition. Sales enablement strategies track metrics such as conversion rates and renewals.

Customer enablement best practices and tips

Now you know all the possible benefits of an effective customer enablement strategy. Next, let’s learn how to achieve those benefits by following some crucial customer enablement best practices.

These best practices include focusing on customer education to boost engagement via personalized onboarding and product walkthroughs. You can also improve the customer experience by introducing customer success teams and collecting customer feedback.

Let’s look at all these customer enablement tips in greater detail below!

Improve customer experience with personalized onboarding

When customers start using a new product or service, there’s always a learning curve. It takes them some time to get comfortable with the product. You can help speed up the process with personalized onboarding.

Simply guide users to areas of interest based on which customer segment they belong to. This onboarding service will help increase product adoption by showing customers how your product can resolve their pain points.

Use interactive product walkthroughs to decrease friction

Interactive product walkthroughs help guide users through all the key actions and encourage them to learn by doing. This way, new customers understand what each action does, how they can do it, and what’s the next step.

Through such walkthroughs, you are providing resources for customers to learn in real time. This also lowers the chances of running into any user friction with your product.

Build an in-app resource center to enable proactive customer support

In case customers ever have any concerns, make it easy for them to find a solution then and there. You can do so by setting up an in-app resource center as part of your customer enablement strategy. This way, customers will always have help just a click away.

Having such a resource center also helps users learn at their own pace, empowering them to troubleshoot independently without having to contact customer support.

Collect and implement customer feedback

One foolproof customer enablement tip is to collect and incorporate customer feedback in all decisions. By focusing on feedback systems, you can uncover user needs and preferences, as well as dislikes and friction points.

Then use this feedback to improve your products or services accordingly, optimizing them for customer success.

3 Customer enablement strategies you can leverage right away

Customer enablement sounds great, but it is easier said than done, right?

Not if you’re equipped with the right strategies. We discuss three of these to help inspire your customer success enablement plans.

We cover how to introduce welcome screens to help you set up your personalized onboarding program, how to make use of different customer satisfaction scores and surveys to get feedback on the spot in-app, and how to leverage onboarding checklists to set users up for success.

Use welcome screens to personalize onboarding

To offer personalized onboarding, you first need to collect the relevant customer data. This data will help you figure out which segment you need to personalize for and what the customer expects.

You can collect this data with a welcome survey, displayed right when users first log in. Use this to identify who your new user is and what their use cases are.

Trigger a CSAT survey in the app to collect feedback

Customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys are a great way to gauge how happy users are with the overall product experience and customer service.

To leverage these, trigger them in-app. Popular survey tools come with custom templates that allow you to set them up in seconds. Next, set up triggers for the feedback surveys to be shown to customers when they complete a specific action. Based on these surveys, you can gather insights into customer sentiment and possible friction points.

Use onboarding checklists to set users up for success

An onboarding checklist contains a list of important actions customers must perform to start strong with your product.

These checklists allow customers to realize your product’s value much faster. You’re able to lower the time to value and increase product adoption.

To design a new user onboarding checklist, you can deploy product onboarding tools such as Userpilot.

Conclusion

If you want improved customer engagement and brand advocacy, you can’t ignore customer enablement. To achieve long-term business growth, you have to empower customers and provide ongoing support instead of just treating them like another number.

Customer enablement can take on many different forms. You could start by providing in-app resources or product walkthroughs to help guide users better. Focus on providing the best customer service based on customer satisfaction scores and feedback. The possibilities are endless.

Want to get started with your customer enablement strategy? Get a Userpilot Demo and see how you can unlock more value for your customers.