Imagine you’ve just purchased a powerful new tool for your business. You’re excited, but after logging in, you’re overwhelmed by all the features even after watching tutorial videos. Frustrated, you consider abandoning the tool altogether. That’s exactly what happens when businesses don’t invest in customer enablement.

Customer enablement ensures your users have the knowledge, resources, and support to confidently use your product and get real value from it. Without it, even the best products can struggle with adoption and retention. In this article, we’ll explore customer enablement strategies that not only educate but empower users - leading to stronger engagement, higher retention, and long-term business growth. 

What is a Customer Enablement Strategy?

Customer enablement is about giving your customers the right knowledge, tools, and resources so they can succeed with your product. A customer enablement strategy is the structured approach you take to equipping customers with the knowledge, tools, and resources they need to effectively use a product or service. 

An example of customer enablement is how Notion creates templates for first-time users to understand core features and easily adopt the product. Another example is how Hubspot launched the Hubspot Academy which offers free certifications and an extensive knowledge base to help users master inbound marketing.

Why Do You Need a Customer Enablement Strategy?

When done right, customer enablement drives user adoption, reduces churn, and strengthens customer relationships by ensuring they can achieve their desired outcomes with minimal friction. So if customers know how to use your product effectively, they will integrate it into their daily workflows which increases your product adoption. 

Over time, when they feel confident with your product, they’d be more likely to stick around and advocate for it. This means that your strategy will help boost retention and loyalty. In addition to enhancing the customer experience, a strong enablement strategy means fewer support tickets and lower customer service costs.

The Four Pillars of Customer Enablement

A strong customer enablement strategy is built on four key pillars which are;

• Education & Training – You need to provide customers with easily accessible learning materials such as webinars, documentation, knowledge bases, and video tutorials. For example, Slack uses guided walkthroughs to ensure new users get up to speed quickly.
• Onboarding & Implementation - Personalised onboarding plans, in-app guides, and dedicated customer success managers help customers get value from your product faster. 
• Support & Engagement - Your customers need multiple support options (live chat, email, community forums) and proactive check-ins to ensure they stay engaged. 
• Feedback & Continuous Improvement - The best enablement programs evolve based on customer feedback

Customer Enablement vs. Customer Success

While both seek to improve customer experience, customer enablement focuses on providing customers with the tools and knowledge to be self-sufficient. In contrast, customer success involves a hands-on approach, guiding customers to their desired outcomes through ongoing engagement. 

Think of customer enablement as teaching someone to fish, while customer success is ensuring they’re fishing in the right spot. Both functions complement each other - customer enablement fuels customer success by making customers more independent and proficient, reducing the need for reactive support. It also allows customers to get value from their investment making it easy to bring up renewals.

5 Actionable Strategies to Drive Customer Enablement

When building your customer enablement strategies, you’ll need to understand their needs, develop resources like videos or guides, leverage technologies like LMS and optimise with data. However, to create a customer enablement strategy that yields tangible results, here are some strategies to implement;

1. Ditch the Generic Onboarding

You already have an onboarding system in place. Whether interactive product tours, in-app tooltips or just a welcome video. But, different customers have different needs. So generic training won’t cut it. You need to segment users by role and create specialised training tracks for each one. 

This is because personalised learning increases adoption rates. A great example is LinkedIn Learning. It doesn’t just offer generic career courses. Instead, the recommendations are curated and tailored to different job roles ensuring users get relevant training. 

Fun fact: 65% of customers say videos are their favourite way to learn how to use a product. So consider having these videos personalised for each customer segment.

2. Lean into Community Engagement 

A strong community fosters knowledge sharing and creates brand advocates. So encourage peer-to-peer learning. You can do this by creating exclusive online groups or Slack communities where users can share insights and best practices. We recommend assigning moderators or community managers to help keep things in order and keep discussions active. 

A great example is Notion’s community forum which allows users to exchange templates and best practices, reducing the reliance on support teams.

3. Making the Learning Engaging and Rewarding

Nobody enjoys boring training sessions. Gamification makes learning fun. In fact, there’s a 60% boost in customer engagement when onboarding and training is gamified. So for your customer enablement, create quizzes, challenges and reward milestones in your training program. 

You can even offer certifications or badges to incentivise users to complete the onboarding process. Duolingo’s achievement badges keep users motivated to complete language lessons so apply this concept to your enablement content.

4. Adopt a Feedback Loop Based on Real Data

Your enablement strategy should evolve based on real user feedback. These insights are what will show you what to optimise in your customer engagement. So encourage your customers to contribute their opinions through automated surveys after onboarding and major product updates. 

You can also use these insights to contribute FAQs, best practices and templates. For example, if you have a community, encourage people to submit real-world case studies, user-generated templates and more. Recognise these contributors with badges like ‘Ambassador’ or ‘Expert’ to drive engagement.

5. Proactive Coaching through Automation

User behaviour-based automation to guide customers before they experience issues. So you can track user activity and send nudges when they struggle with a specific feature. For example, you can set up email sequences that introduce these key features over time and how to use them. 

You can also upgrade this by customer success check-ins for your high-value users. In fact, you can offer premium consulting packages that include personalised enablement. This will help attract high-ticket clients over time. 

Drive Customer Success Enablement and More with Stellafai

Enabling your customer is just one step. You also have to enable your customer success teams to ensure your customers get long-term value from your offering. This customer success enablement goes beyond training, it requires a structured approach with the right methodologies, tools, and coaching. 

Stellafai empowers your teams through OKRs, a space for tailored coaching programs, and proven success frameworks to maximise impact. 

So whether you're looking to streamline onboarding, scale support, or drive long-term engagement, Stellafai provides the structure and automation needed to take your customer success efforts to the next level. 

Want to find out how you can start enabling your teams today? Book a free call with our head coach Tim here.