Customer Enablement

What is customer enablement?

Customer expectations are higher than ever leading to a crowded market and a very wide range of providers and solutions. With the “grass is always greener” mentality dominating attitudes towards brands, businesses are now contending with major challenges around solidifying customer loyalty and cementing their market share.

However, there is a tool organizations can use to strengthen their standings, boost customer loyalty, and increase renewals -- customer enablement.

A business strategy which utilizes training, education, and support systems, customer enablement ensures that clients are able to maximize the value they gain from a solution, and know how to best leverage it to reach their goals.

In a highly competitive B2B landscape, simply selling a software package isn’t enough. You have to provide all-encompassing support and devote time, resources, and manpower to guaranteeing that your clients can effectively use your product and find it helpful. Without it, you’re taking a risk that your customers will be wooed by another company that’s committed to guiding them towards success. Customer enablement also plays a critical role in encouraging client renewal. It gives vendors a tool to show customers that working with a particular brand means individualized attention and a commitment to their organization’s success.

Why customer enablement matters

Transforming your customers into brand ambassadors, and even vocal supporters of your business that sing the praises of your product far and wide, begins with customer enablement. Essentially, customer enablement equips your customers to get the most out of your product, which naturally increases their appreciation of your solution and brand.

Customer loyalty is essential for every company’s success. In today’s world, however, where companies are constantly competing to raise the industry standard and provide their clients with more and more bells-and-whistles, fostering a strong relationship with customers can make the difference between success and failure. A strong approach to customer enablement is no longer optional -- it’s a crucial factor that will ensure your success grows to scale with your product offerings and customer base.

With customer churn posing an unprecedented challenge, especially to B2B companies, a stellar customer enablement strategy can help solidify customer loyalty and drastically reduce turnover. A seamless integration and adoption process helps seal the deal and lock in customers for a long-term relationship.

Best practices for customer enablement

The following points will help you create an outstanding customer enablement strategy.

Empower your customers

The key to customer enablement lies in giving your clients the tools they need to succeed. That means focusing on a highly effective onboarding process as well as customer education. This strengthens your clients’ understanding of your solution and guides them to how they can best use your product to fit their unique business needs.

Resolve issues quickly and build a reliable support service

Make it clear across the organization that fielding client inquiries, hands-on troubleshooting, and comprehensive customer support should be high among your company’s priorities.

“Building a good customer experience does not happen by accident. It happens by design,” says Clare Muscutt, a customer loyalty expert and entrepreneur. In other words, embrace customer support as a central tenet of your business strategy.

Incorporate customer feedback into your services

Being agile and responsive to client comments is critical for both customer enablement and customer education. Positive and negative feedback alike serves as valuable guidance towards understanding the real strengths and weaknesses of your product.

Adjusting your offerings based on the real-world comments of your clients will strengthen your solution, as well as demonstrate that your company values its clients.

Elevate your value with business opportunities

Beyond stellar customer onboarding and a smooth adoption process, creating situations for your clients to grow their businesses will take your customer enablement to the next level.

Tailor your advocacy strategy so that you can create opportunities for customers to interact with potential prospects. This will lock in your clients’ loyalty and transform them into strong advocates for your brand.

This is where Strigo comes in!

Customer enablement is far more than a one-off event -- it’s a continuous, long-term effort, which requires committed, ongoing investment on your end to make an impact. It’s about building a mutual relationship with your customers, listening to their needs and supporting them at all times, throughout each phase of the learning, adaptation, and integration process.

A large part of this effort is guiding your customers towards finding the best ways for them to use your product and leverage it to achieve their goals. Strigo’s Product Education Platform is a powerful tool designed from the bottom up to help you do exactly that — provide highly effective hands-on learning journeys at scale which ensure that your customers can maximize the value of your product for their businesses.

The Strigo platform enables you to provide enablement through:

• On-demand customer learning - Interactive self-paced learning sessions that drive learner engagement and ensure knowledge retention.
• Virtual instructor-led training (VILT) - Hands-on enablement experiences that maximize customer engagement while empowering trainers.
• Virtual hands-on labs - Practical hands-on learning labs where customers can train on any software product in their own cloud-based environment.