5 Customer Enablement Tools to Create Power Users

When a customer buys your product or service, you have a short but critical window to build a relationship and help them get the most out of your product. 

Fail to execute this step, and you could lose customers to a competitor.

Planning a clear post-sale strategy with the right customer enablement tools helps you increase customer satisfaction and build brand loyalty. Effective customer training helps buyers use your products and services, excel in their roles, and get the maximum value from your solutions.

In a TSIA study, 68 percent of trained customers reported using the product more, 56 percent said they were able to use more features, and 87 percent reported being able to use the product more independently.

Of course, having the right tools is essential to seeing these results and improving customer experience, ultimately boosting retention and driving more revenue for your business.

What does customer enablement do?

Customer enablement gives your customers the resources they need to succeed with your product or service. This is especially important for SaaS companies, B2B organizations, and any other business with a complex product or service.

A vital part of customer success is helping users get quick wins immediately. The more quickly a buyer can see positive results from their purchase, the more likely they are to be happy with the investment and stay with your company rather than searching for alternatives.

By creating immediate value, customer enablement also drives higher product adoption. 

The right customer education resources help buyers use your product effectively much faster than simply providing FAQs and hoping for the best. 

 Read more: 5 Benefits of a Customer Education Program

Customer enablement vs. customer success

Is customer enablement the same as customer success? Certainly, customer enablement helps buyers succeed. However, it’s only part of the equation.  

Customer success encompasses everything your organization does to align your product or service with users’ expectations. In reality, customer success starts during the early stages of the customer journey and includes clearly defining the problem you solve, finding leads with that specific need, and helping the customer identify their need and understand how your product or service solves it.

 Customer enablement is the part of customer success that comes immediately after the sale, but it doesn’t encompass everything that’s required to help customers succeed.

You may also hear people talk about “customer success enablement,” which is a different process. Customer success enablement is internal training for customer success teams to help them support customers more effectively. 

Customer enablement tools your team needs

Creating the right customer enablement program requires the right tools.

With effective technology and platforms, you can give your customers a high-quality onboarding experience, a customer education academy, and continuous learning and support to encourage customer loyalty. 

Video hosting tools

Using video is a vital part of creating engaging content. You can create videos in-house and upload them to a customer education platform with a high-quality video hosting tool.

 A video hosting service prevents putting large video files on your website’s servers. When large files clog up your server, site performance can suffer, video playback can lag, and other problems arise. A dedicated video hosting tool allows you to store videos without disrupting other operations.

 Popular video hosting platforms include:

• Vimeo
• Wistia
• Brightcove
• YouTube 

Messaging tools for customer communication

To create a customer education program that can scale, you’ll need automation and built-in communication that can help customers walk through using your product or service. 

For example, some software has a built-in walkthrough that helps new users get oriented. Other companies use automated emails to streamline the onboarding process. 

In both cases, these tools help allow you to assign a customer success team member to each new user.

Well-known platforms that include messaging tools include:

• Salesforce
• Intercom
• Zendesk

Knowledge base

A knowledge base can give your customers an easy-to-use self-service educational tool. Knowledge bases have grown far beyond the FAQs of a decade ago. Today, you can provide a searchable comprehensive guide and deliver precise information exactly when it’s needed. 

Many knowledge bases are databases with hundreds of written articles, but with the Learning Cloud from WorkRamp, your knowledge base can be much more dynamic. With the Learning Cloud, you can create a self-service resource that includes multiple types of content available on-demand for your users. 

All-in-one learning platform

There are over 11,000 marketing technology options on the 2023 Marketing Technology Landscape map. However, your organization doesn’t need thousands of tools. Instead, you need a single tool that can do multiple jobs within the organization. 

That’s why an all-in-one LMS like the Learning Cloud is so powerful. With the Learning Cloud, you can streamline employee and customer training, including onboarding, revenue enablement and sales training, employee training, compliance training, customer education, and more. 

 An all-in-one solution allows you to customize your training to meet the specific needs of your teams, customers, and partners. 

Academy and certifications

Creating any effective customer enablement program requires you to move beyond a simple knowledge base. Using an all-in-one learning platform like WorkRamp, you can create training programs that take users beyond the basics and teach them about less-common use cases, features, and how to get maximum value from your product or service.

These training programs can be a customer academy, a certification program, or both. 

 For example, Qualified uses WorkRamp to run Qualified University, an education program that helps customers understand how to use Qualified to better build sales pipeline. Tony Vaughn, former Director of Qualified University, found that trained accounts were at least twice as likely to renew and were better prepared to use the software to its full potential. 

The Learning Cloud provides a platform for your customer education program and can also host your new hire training, sales enablement, internal employee development, and more to give you maximum ROI for your investment.

Community

Another way to foster customer education is to let power users educate newer users. Building a solid community around your product or service can help new customers learn from people who have used the product for similar use cases.

Megan Leung, WorkRamp’s Customer Marketing Manager, shares how we use our Slack community to benefit customers.

“We use our Slack community in two key ways: As a channel for customers to have a direct line to our team. Each customer has their own private channel to reach out to support or their CSM for questions. Our product and leadership teams are also active in the public channels collecting and responding to feedback so customers have a tangible way to contribute to our product direction through our community. It’s also a place for our customers to connect with each other and engage in peer-to-peer learning, not only on product knowledge but also for industry best practices.”

 Some common community tools include Tribe, Slack, and Circle. 

Get the right customer enablement tools to empower your users

Customer enablement significantly affects the value your customers get from your products and services. It’s vital to have a robust program that uses various tools like the ones we explored above.

Of course, the foundational piece of your customer enablement program is your learning platform. With the Learning Cloud, you can create a high-quality customer enablement program and create engaging new-hire training, employee development, sales enablement, and more. 

 Ready to see the Learning Cloud in action? Contact us for a free, personalized demo.