What Is Customer Enablement? Effective Strategies and Programs

Customer enablement isn’t simply support with a fancy twist. It’s a sustained business function determined to empower customers, to maximize their value, and to deliver their desired outcomes so well it increases retention, loyalty, and leads to further business.

Today, let me walk you through the basics of customer enablement:

• What is customer enablement, what it isn’t along with its purpose.
• A breakdown of tactics, strategies, programs, and other initiatives used to enable customers to reach their goals.
• How it integrates within your customer success strategy and which people on your CS team should be responsible for enablement.

What Is Customer Enablement?

What Customer Enablement IS:

Customer enablement is a strategic function designed to facilitate and drive customer outcomes. Through customer enablement, a company prioritizes the support, training, and solutions customers need to achieve their goals within the business relationship. The idea is that providing value secures the customer relationship, resulting in increased brand loyalty and lifetime value.

Customer enablement is furthermore part of the wider customer success strategy that stems from behavioral psychology, purporting the same idea of delivering customer outcomes at scale to enable their success and your mutual growth.

Real-World Example:

Consider a SaaS company offering project management software. Customer enablement involves not only onboarding new users but also creating a tailored success plan that guides customers to leverage automation features for project tracking. This results in improved team productivity and measurable ROI for the customer. Such consistent value creation deepens the customer relationship and builds loyalty.

What Customer Enablement IS NOT:

• Customer support / service
• Product adoption
• Sales enablement
• Customer onboarding

Rather, it’s all of them combined and more (except for Sales enablement). Let me explain:

• Customer enablement is not simply customer support. While customer support can be considered part of the overarching strategy, it’s not its only component.
• Customer enablement is not product adoption. However, if done right, it helps drive product adoption and user engagement.
• Customer enablement is not sales enablement. The latter focuses on closing new deals while the former is more concerned with customers who’ve already signed. Here’s a side by side comparison of the two often-confused types of enablement:
• Customer enablement is not customer onboarding. Customer onboarding is only one of the initial steps of the tactic, and an essential one at that, but enablement takes a more holistic view of the customer journey.

What CAREER Is Associated with Customer Enablement:

Customer enablement is typically a part of the customer success strategy, and as such the function is part of the customer success career path. As for who is in charge of customer enablement, the answer can be more complex:

• The entire CS department. In a sense, everyone in customer success is more or less responsible for customer enablement, even upsell managers – after all, upgrading to a higher plan might be in the customer’s best interest and enable their success.
• Customer Success Engineer (CSE) is often in charge of tailoring specific solutions for a particular customer, often together with the lead Customer Success Manager for that account.
• Customer Enablement Managers (aka Customer Support / Success Enablement Manager or Partner / Solutions Enablement Manager) – If customer enablement is taken more seriously, then it’s often handled by a dedicated

Emerging Trend: More SaaS companies are appointing dedicated Customer Enablement Managers, reflecting the rising importance of tailored customer journeys and specialized knowledge delivery.

What’s the PURPOSE of Customer Enablement:

The ultimate goal of both customer enablement and its overarching CS strategy is to drive growth for the company. This is achieved through key goals that simultaneously improve customer experiences while boosting loyalty and revenue potential.

1. Driving Product Adoption and Usage

To start, customer enablement puts onboarding first, telling customers how you will work towards their goals. It’s a complex process of value realization that, if done correctly, can fundamentally change customer behavior:

1. Value Definition: Engage with customers to understand their goals and tailor success plans accordingly.
2. Value Delivery: Execute strategies and deliver outcomes that match customer expectations.
3. Value Realization & Validation: Ensure customers derive tangible and replicable benefits from their engagements.
4. Value Optimization: Work towards fine-tuning processes to enable scalable, predictable success.

Best Practice Tip: Use interactive training sessions, knowledge base resources, and tailored follow-ups during the value realization stage.

Interesting Statistic: Gartner estimates over 60% of frontline sales enablement organizations will add more customer-facing roles to improve the customer journey beyond the initial sale by 2025.

2. Improving Retention and Reducing Churn

Another key goal of customer enablement is to improve retention and lower churn. It’s typically a byproduct of all the nice customer-driven efforts that make up customer success management, but you can also prioritize it outright by:

• Implementing Measures to Reduce Involuntary Churn – customers can also leave accidentally when their card expires. You can use an account updater to automatically communicate with the bank and sort it out, or implement dunning emails alerting customers to do so themselves.
• Proactively Monitor Churn Precursors and Act on Them – once you’ve been at this for a while, it’s easy to detect when customers are about to churn. With a good CSP supporting automation, you can simply set up flows to launch countermeasures that help customers and avoid churn.
• Actively Listen to Your Best Customers – a key customer enablement effort is to truly listen to your customers – not just send a CSAT survey and look at the resulting average , but actually reach out to both best-fit and high-ARR customers and ask for feedback.

3. Increasing Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty

Enablement paves the way for deeper customer loyalty by consistently delivering value and fostering authentic relationships. The aim is not just retention but turning customers into brand advocates who feel genuinely supported.

Loyalty comes through consistency in customer enablement – i.e. making it a point to help customers, even if you can’t always solve their issue, the key is to genuinely try and be authentic, which brings me to my next point:

4. Generating Revenue through Authentic Engagement

As I already said, the goal of customer enablement and customer success overall is to help the business grow. After all, it would be a poor business function that which only assists the customer without thinking of solvency and return on investment.

By authentically engaging with customers in a budget-conscious way and by attempting to fulfill their goals, you’re fostering a future-proof client relationship and source or revenue. It’s truly as simple as that.

Emerging Trend: Leverage data-driven insights from onboarding or customer success tools like Custify to tailor product experiences, capturing upsell potential based on usage metrics and behavioral patterns.

Strategies and Programs for Effective Customer Enablement

1. Create Enablement-Focused Customer Journeys

To effectively implement a customer enablement approach at scale, you need to zero in on each moment in a customer’s lifecycle and make it the best it can be. That means zooming in on each stage of the customer journey and refocus it towards customer enablement:

• Create automated workflows and playbooks to provide timely support based on where customers are in their journey.
• Prioritize customer education by working together with marketing to create materials, product tours, and other collaterals that assist throughout the customer journey.
• Create customer communities – either a single one or multiple ones divided by segments – and encourage customers to collaborate and share ideas. As humans, we have a deep-seated need to be part of a community – you can use such an approach to drive loyalty and create a sense of home for your customers.

Example:
Shopify created Facebook groups where users can engage with each other. To further drive the feeling of community, they also regularly organize meetups where their customers collaborate, share ideas, and have a nice time (leading to a positive brand experience).

2. Leverage Data for Tailored Experiences

Your customers give you something invaluable every time they log into your product – and no, I’m not talking about their MRR. I’m speaking, of course, about their datapoints – things like their engagement level, feature usage, product usage, feedback metrics, and more!

All this data can be centralized in your CSP where you can use it to provide tailored experiences for your customers. Enabling their success is ten times easier when you’re working with known variables instead of guesstimating.

Example:
Your CSP data shows customers’ risk of churn drops by 50% once they use feature X. However, the same dashboard shows that most customers have difficulty reaching or adopting that feature in your product. The solution? Prioritize it during onboarding, make it more obvious in the product, and ensure training materials on how to use it are readily available in your knowledge base.

Never forget it’s impossible for customers to remember 100% of the info dumped on them during onboarding, so having documentation for them to fall back on is not just smart, it’s essential to long-term growth.

3. Start a Voice of the Customer Program

Obtain insights directly from your best-fit, best-performing, and best-ARR customers.
A viable, future-proof, and insightful tactic for customer enablement is putting together a Voice of the Customer program. The gist of it is to make gathering customer feedback into a repeatable, actionable, and scalable process within your organization, communicating with relevant teams to ensure implementation while retaining ownership within customer success.

The main steps of a VoC process are:

• Listening for customer feedback. It’s not just looking at what customers are saying, but also creating a system so that the feedback itself is prescient and as specific as possible. One way you can optimize it is by listening predominantly to your best-fit or high-MRR customers. Another trick is to not rely solely on direct feedback – indirect feedback like reviews or social posts can be a gold mine for insights into your customer base.
• Selecting and acting on actionable feedback. Once you know what your customers are saying, it’s time to sift through their opinions so that nothing but the most useful remain. Then you can pass it over to Product, Sales, Customer Service, or your own team for implementation.
• Analyzing the results and reporting back. At the end of the process, be sure to measure your efforts to justify the value of a VoC to management. And report back to the customers whose feedback you implemented.

Example:
Semrush asks users for feedback directly next to the features for which they want feedback. This ensures the feedback is highly specific.

Then, they allow the user to enter their email (which can be distinct from the account email). This ensures the feedback is actionable (they can follow-up for more details during implementation). It also helps them close the loop by reaching back out to the users who submitted the feedback after it’s been implemented.

4. Make Adoption Your North Star During Onboarding

Everyone says you should optimize customer onboarding, but why? What’s your key metric? Is it the time for onboarding completion? Your customer engagement rate? What about the customer effort score?

All of these can be helpful to track. But the north star when it comes to customer enablement should always be product adoption. Why? If a customer hasn’t even understood your product enough to use it, what chance is there that it enables their success?

To ensure adoption, you’ve got to master onboarding. To master onboarding, try a few of the following tactics:

1. Tailor onboarding flows to specific customer segments and ensure the lead CSM for those accounts can track their journey.
2. Create product tours that work to show customers how specific features in your product work (particularly the more complex ones).
3. Nail first time user experiences. Picture this: a customer buys 100 seats. They all log into your software and are lost. A nightmare, right? Well, if you ensure their first experience is welcoming, personal, and educational, they’ll sing your praises around the water cooler later.
4. Craft a killer self-service option. Most customers just want to be able to learn how to help themselves to save time – make it easy for them with a well-structured documentation section or tutorial videos they can go back to.

Example:
Apple has, since its inception, been laser-focused on first time user experiences with the iconic “Hello” screen that moves on to the simple and effective product tour. Add to that their shiny documentation section which not only looks good, but does what it sets out to do: help you get to a solution fast and with as little hassle as possible.

5. Focus on Capturing Customer Outcomes

The most important reason why customers come to you is to achieve some desired outcomes. Sometimes they know those outcomes, sometimes they don’t. But they will always set some, even if they do it unconsciously. Your job as a customer enablement specialist should be to first find out what those are (it can be more complex than you realize) and then deliver those outcomes or help customers reach goal achievement on their own.

To effectively do that:

1. Prioritize asking outcome-related questions during the pre-sale or onboarding phases. Making customers state their own wants out-loud is the first step towards solving them.
2. Assign KPIs to each customer outcome – unless they’re entirely abstract, it will be very easy to measure if those outcomes have been reached. Just ensure that you’re tracking the right things.
3. Confirm you’ve understood what customers want. Even if customers explicitly say what they want, sometimes something is lost in interpretation. That’s why I like to restate customer outcomes back to them to ensure everyone’s aligned.
4. Ensure alignment and delivery across your team. Make use of subject matter experts (SMEs) to guarantee you’ve understood the assignment and are adequately delivering it.

Example:
DocuSign, a digital agreement platform, takes a smart, segmented approach to delivering customer outcomes, providing expert-backed, industry-specific, and localized solutions. For example, for healthcare, it provides HIPAA-compliant solutions, or for EU-based customers it provides locally-compliant e-signature standards. All that is to say, they looked at highly-specific customer needs and enabled their successful outcomes across a global market with full compliance.

Integrating Customer Enablement into Your Customer Success Strategy

Customer enablement is an integral part of customer success. In fact, without customer enablement, I’d argue we’d have no customer success. It’s a cornerstone of all our efforts as CSMs and one of the key results of a typical customer success strategy.

It’s also important to understand how different roles within your organization contribute at key stages of the customer journey. Here’s how these touchpoints can fit through the stages, making collaboration seamless:

Stages and Integration Touchpoints:

1. Customer Onboarding Stage:

• Customer Success Managers (CSMs): CSMs play a crucial role in onboarding by guiding customers through product setup, delivering initial training, and ensuring a smooth transition to using your solution.
• Product Managers: Work with CSMs to ensure the product features introduced during onboarding are tailored to meet specific customer needs, providing additional support if customers encounter difficulties.
• Marketing Team: Create educational materials, product guides, onboarding videos, and customer-facing content to complement the efforts of the CSMs and facilitate a smooth onboarding process.

2. Adoption Stage:

• Customer Success Managers: Continue engagement by tracking product usage, providing training sessions, and tailoring resources based on customer behavior and needs.
• Product Managers: Collect feedback from CSMs to optimize features, address pain points, and introduce enhancements that improve adoption.
• Support Team: Step in when needed to address customer issues and ensure a frictionless product experience that promotes adoption.

3. Retention Stage:

• Customer Success Managers: Monitor customer health scores, reach out proactively when engagement drops, and offer personalized support and resources to keep customers on track.
• Marketing Team: Create re-engagement campaigns, educational webinars, and newsletters to reinforce product value and keep customers engaged.
• Product Managers: Work with the CS team to improve features and respond to evolving customer needs, aligning product updates with customer feedback and retention goals.

4. Expansion and Advocacy Stage:

• Customer Success Managers: Identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities by analyzing customer needs and demonstrating how premium features or higher-tier services align with their goals.
• Sales Team (if applicable): Collaborate with CSMs to close expansion deals based on customer enablement data and demonstrated outcomes.
• Marketing Team: Nurture satisfied customers to become advocates by creating case studies, offering incentives for referrals, and featuring their success stories in public forums.
• Product Managers: Gather insights from advocates to inform product improvements, ensuring they remain enthusiastic supporters.

Implementing Collaboration Through Integration Touchpoints:

• Regular Cross-Functional Meetings: Organize touchpoint meetings between CSMs, Product Managers, and Marketing teams to share insights, align on strategy, and address customer needs holistically.
• Customer Data Sharing: Use a unified platform (e.g., a Customer Success Platform) that consolidates data from all touchpoints, allowing for coordinated efforts and real-time visibility into customer progress.
• Shared Metrics and Goals: Define shared KPIs (e.g., product adoption rates, churn reduction, expansion revenue) to align all teams on common objectives.

How Enablement Aligns with Success Metrics

Customer enablement is a natural extension of customer success, supplementing the efforts of the entire team and helping improve CS metrics across the board. Customer enablement helps by:

• Driving product and feature adoption. Both are KPIs for CS as a whole, and both result in increased customer retention and satisfaction.
• Actively monitoring customer happiness and acting to improve it, thereby reducing voluntary customer churn.
• Refocusing the entire CS effort towards more customer-driven goals that ultimately lead to longer customer relationships and increased revenue.

Summing Up

Enabling customer outcomes is a future-proof and enticing function within customer success – one most CSMs take on to some degree. We all enjoy helping people succeed and generating company growth and revenue while we’re at it – so customer enablement fits like a glove on all the roles within CS.

Are you trying to improve your workflows to drive customer goals forward with speed and efficiency? Reach out to one of our CSMs today to see how we can help you achieve true customer enablement.