A 5% increase in customer retention can lead to a revenue increase of 25 to 95%.
Customer acquisition can be cheap and quick, yet customer retention remains the holy grail for many businesses. Thankfully, there's a range of tools you can use to make some areas of customer retention easier. One such development has been the rise of customer enablement.
So what is customer enablement, and how can it benefit your business? Let's explore everything you need to know.
What Is Customer Enablement?
Customer enablement is a way of educating customers to understand how to use your products or services. Some companies don't need to implement this too much. A clothing company, for example, will rarely have to explain to people how to wear their clothes.
For many organizations, however, things aren't quite so straightforward. To help customers get the most out of your products or services, you may need to provide them with some assistance. This is typically done through tools, training, and other resources.
Customer enablement is most often used by B2B and SaaS organizations—more so by ones that use subscription models. This is because B2C products and services are relatively easy to understand and tend to include things most people have experienced.
Customer enablement can be supplied through onboarding, community forums, and demos. This will add value to any items your clients are purchasing.
You want to equip users with whatever they need to get the most out of what you're selling. The result is that customer experience and, therefore, customer satisfaction will improve.
The ultimate goal is to meet the needs of customers. This will help make sure they get everything they can out of your products or services. A collaborative approach helps this work effectively.
Why Do Businesses Need Customer Enablement?
Customer service is a crucial aspect of any business. The Covid-19 pandemic has significantly increased this. Providing customers with a positive experience is one of the best ways to ensure they return to you.
Customer enablement is a critical factor of good customer service, so improving on this in any way you can help your business. You should always have a team of support agents ready to answer your customers' questions. They can assist your clients in real-time, helping them overcome any obstacles they find.
While your support team will help a lot, they won't be able to assist every customer non-stop, constantly troubleshooting issues. You should also set up a support system whereby clients can solve problems independently. The easier people can resolve issues, the more satisfied they'll be with their experience.
It has become prevalent for companies to implement a self-service portal on their website. Clients can go through this to solve any problems they run into quickly and effectively. This will also reduce the strain on your support team, helping things run more smoothly.
As a customer enablement manager, it's your responsibility to set this up and ensure it meets your customers' needs. It should answer any questions that people often ask and clearly explain to people how to resolve common issues.
Customer Enablement Best Practices
Having a trained support team is essential, but setting up a sound customer enablement system is just as important. This will look different for every organization, depending on the goods or services you offer and the clients you provide them for.
With that being said, there are certain practices that any organization should follow. They'll help you implement quality customer enablement, improving the customer service experience you provide.
Build Customer Communities
One of the most helpful customer enablement tools you have is other customers. Building an engaged online community allows your customers to share their experiences with others. This will foster emotional connections and help people find answers to their questions in a user-friendly environment.
In most circumstances, when a customer has an issue, another customer would have had to deal with the same thing in the past. When customers need help, they can search through a forum and may come across a previous example. Knowledge sharing is one of the quickest and easiest ways for customers to find solutions, and they'll be able to resolve things without needing to contact your company.
Building a community where your customers can communicate and interact will also foster brand advocacy. This way, you can instill a sense of trust and community, which will help with customer retention.
Educate Customers
Self-service resources like those mentioned above will help customers resolve issues quickly and effectively. If your customers are already educated, however, they'll be able to solve more problems themselves, without looking for guidance.
Through your website, you can provide various resources such as videos, demos, and training that will show your customers how to best use your products or services. Guidde can help you deliver this through our software enablement platform. Our solutions can provide customers with knowledge and information while driving product engagement.
Providing your customers with these resources can increase their confidence, making them more likely to invest in your products, services, and brand. You can use explainer videos and webinar recordings and upload them to YouTube or a similar video hosting site. This is a great way to help your customers and is very cost-effective.
You can take things a bit further by adding a gamification element. Using badges, medals, and leaderboards, you can encourage customers to go through these materials.
You can also provide information through regular blog posts. You can enable custom robots.txt to help guide customers to the correct pages where they'll find the answers they're looking for.
Encourage and Implement Customer Feedback
Customer feedback is one of the most valuable tools when you want to improve your business. It can give you an idea of what your customers like and don't like; then, you can make informed decisions about what changes to make.
This applies to all areas of your business, including customer enablement. If many customers complain because they don't understand something specific, then you can make sure there's more clarity in that area.
By providing this feedback to your team, they can better understand customers' viewpoints. They can then work with this to help improve the customer experience.
You can get an idea of customer loyalty through an NPS (Net Promotor Score). Use surveys to ask customers about their experience and whether or not they would recommend your company. It also helps to add a comment box so they can explain their choice.
Feedback gives better insights into what people think of your brand and can highlight specific issues. Take this information on board, and use it to improve your business.
Provide Good Customer Support
There are various ways you can provide support to your customers. One thing you should always try to do is make it easy for them to get this support. Good customer service enablement will let people know where they need to go to get help with specific issues.
You can implement a range of communication channels so that customers can contact your business in various ways. This includes channels like:
- Contact email
- chatbots
- etc.
This way, customers can get assistance through whatever platform is best for them. You just need to ensure that your customer support team constantly covers all of these channels. Slow responses aren't good for customer experience, so your team needs to keep up with things.
Help Customers Find Success
Your customer support team reacts to issues your customers have as and when they occur. Customer success enablement is a way of resolving issues in advance so that clients never actually suffer from them. This is a proactive approach, which constantly assesses the business to find ways for improvement.
This works as a direct follow-up to sales. Once a customer has purchased a product or service, customer success will help them get started and ensure their experience is without hindrance. It can also be a good idea to regularly check on clients to ensure everything is running smoothly and they're using your products to meet their goals.
Customer Enablement With Guidde
With how vital customer enablement is, you should be trying to improve it in any way you can. Guidde can help you provide the best support to your customers, giving them the knowledge they need to use your products or services. We also offer customer enablement jobs for those interested.
If you have any questions about how we can help you, click here to contact us today.
