Customer Spotlight: 6 Tips for Building Effective CX Enablement Programs

This isn’t the first time you’ll hear this, and it won’t be the last: create an effective customer experience. 

Like most organizations, customer acquisition is likely an important KPI for your team’s success, but what about customer experience (CX)? Seventy-three percent of consumers say that CX is a deciding factor.

Beyond helping you hit your sales targets, a positive customer experience can lead to high-impact results, including customer retention, customer loyalty, and brand advocacy.

So how do you build a CX program to retain customers and develop brand champions? In this customer spotlight, Susan Burrows-Rangel, CX Enablement Manager at Miro, shares her tips to build a successful program that engages learners. 

Tip # 1: Don’t go it alone

Like most successful business ventures, building a CX enablement program is a team effort. It’s essential to get managers, internal teams, and customers involved in the planning process.

First, partner with managers to ensure your content matches your objectives. Then, reach out to internal and external champions.

Team members and customers can act as brand ambassadors to get people excited about your content and program. 

Susan recommends using your team to temperature-check your approach and repeating this process throughout planning and execution.

This can help you ensure your content matches your objectives and focus areas. “There’s not much point in creating an entire program on something that’s no longer relevant,” Susan says. “Make sure you’re checking in with your partners often. Constantly giving updates and asking for feedback is key.”

Tip #2: Balance advanced learners vs. new employees

Adapting your approach and content based on a learner’s experience level is important. For example, you want to create less new content for existing employees to prevent fatigue. 

You can also leverage your advanced learners as teachers to help newer employees.

For example, advanced learners can:

• Lead sessions
• Share real-life examples from their own experience
• Facilitate breakout groups

This approach lets you leverage the effectiveness of social learning, where individuals can learn by observing and imitating others. Based on a Bloomfire study on Social Learning and the Future of Work, 87 percent of employees identify social knowledge sharing as essential, while only 37 percent feel the same about formal learning. 

In addition, hearing peers share their challenges and be vulnerable about things that don’t go as planned is powerful; it promotes an environment and culture of empathy in the learning process.

Tip #3: Be clear about your learners’ objectives 

This may be obvious, but it’s easy to forget that people are very busy. As a result, you need to make your objectives and expectations clear for every training, particularly for live training sessions. 

Defining objectives helps learners understand the why or the “what’s in it for me” behind training. This can help them be more engaged during lessons. 

“Everyone is overwhelmed with meetings right now, so no one wants to see another meeting on their schedule unless the value is understood,” Susan says. “Being clear about your objectives, outcomes, and expectations is key. You can have the best enablement program in the world, but if it’s an hour of training content that lacks manager follow-up and has zero learning transfer into the actual work, it won’t be successful.”

Tip #4: Be concise

Lessons don’t need to be long to be thorough and impactful. Create short, digestible learning content. Keeping lessons concise and being mindful of people’s time will help boost retention.

Follow these instructional design best practices:

• Try to keep lessons to 3 to 5 minutes, max
• Use a casual yet high-energy tone
• Break up lessons over 10 minutes into sections
• Use video and interactive elements

Read more: Make eLearning engaging in 7 steps

Tip #5: Break training out into 101- and 201-style learnings

Create a tiered structure for your training. For example, establish introductory sessions as 101 courses and advanced training as 201.

This gives your learners a path to follow and helps them see the progression.

Instead of scheduling all lessons simultaneously, break them out over time so that advanced lessons build on the introductory training.

This works particularly well when it comes to onboarding new team members. Susan uses the approach where the first few weeks of CSM onboarding include 101 foundational-level content. Once the Mironeer is out of onboarding and they have more knowledge of the topics, they study 201-level content that includes more practical activities and examples now that the topic and experience are more “real.” 

“We love learning at Miro,” Susan says, “and 301-level content involves more advanced mastery or specialization of a topic and perhaps a certification. Sidenote: badges are a lot of fun for those competitive folks who like to collect things!”  

Tip #6 Balance text-based and practical content

Individuals have different learning styles. Based on the VARK model, some individuals learn from a mix of styles and formats. Still, most have one dominant learning style:

• Visual: Learning by seeing images and information
• Auditory: Retaining information from listening and speaking
• Reading/writing: Learning by taking in information displayed as text
• Kinesthetic: Learning by doing

Read more: What is Multimodal Learning?

To engage different types of learners, include a mix of practical content and readable content. 

Susan explains how the Miro team uses WorkRamp to engage learners:

“There’s only so much you can read, but actually doing, that’s the important part, as that’s where the learning transfer happens,” she says. “We’ve had a lot of success with learning programs where we assign pre-work in WorkRamp that includes the foundations of the topic plus call examples, videos, and audio to bring it to life. We follow this with a virtual or in-person Enablement Hour where we review what was covered in the pre-work but spend most of the time roleplaying, problem-solving, and diving into making the topic real. Unless it’s a complex process that needs to be reviewed multiple times in multiple ways, do your best to ensure that live sessions don’t just repeat what we’ve already covered. Use it to reinforce and make it real!”

Creating a positive customer experience starts during the sales process and continues throughout their journey with your brand. CX is an ongoing strategy that can lead to customer loyalty, brand advocacy, and, ultimately, increased revenue growth.  

WorkRamp Content offers a comprehensive, curated catalog of ready-to-go content from industry-leading experts that you can use to create a CX enablement program that will make your customer success teams well-prepared to partner with your customers for long-term success. 

Learn more about using WorkRamp Content to build impactful programs for internal teams and customers.