Customer enablement: What it is + why you need it

Some businesses don’t have to worry too much about post-purchase instructions. Conair doesn’t need a dedicated team to teach customers how to use a hairdryer, and Titleist doesn’t need to introduce consumers to golf. However, some organizations need to help customers understand, use, and realize the most value from their products, a process known as customer enablement.

Customer enablement can make or break product adoption and plays a significant role in long-term loyalty. In this guide, we detail why it’s important, how it contributes to the customer experience (CX), and how you can bring this philosophy to your organization.

More in this guide:

• Why do businesses need customer enablement?
• Benefits of customer enablement
• Examples of customer enablement
• Customer enablement vs. sales enablement
• Customer enablement best practices
• Frequently asked questions
• Enhance your customer enablement with Zendesk

Why do businesses need customer enablement?

Businesses need customer enablement to ensure consumers can effectively use their products or services. It can improve the CX, increase customer loyalty, and build long-term relationships.

With many B2C organizations, product education and follow-up information usually isn’t necessary. However, with SaaS and B2B products—especially those with subscription models—customer enablement helps users understand the product and adds value to the purchased item.

Businesses can conduct customer enablement in several ways:

• Offering dedicated customer support—often supplemented with artificial intelligence (AI)
• Creating helpful customer self-service assets like knowledge bases, templates, how-to articles, and other product-specific resources

• Establishing customer communities where consumers can learn from other users

Customer enablement works best when you take a collaborative approach to customer service. Agents equip users with the materials needed to achieve their goals, and buyers provide companies with feedback.

Benefits of customer enablement

Customer enablement can bring several benefits to your organization. Here are some of the most impactful.

Improved customer experience

The customer experience doesn’t just include customer service—it’s every interaction they have with your brand, whether contacting a support agent or browsing your knowledge base. With a successful customer enablement strategy, you can ensure you sufficiently support them with tailored onboarding, ongoing product support, and self-service resources, such as FAQ pages. This increases customer satisfaction as users have everything they need at their fingertips.

Increased product adoption

Technical products can be intimidating for first-time users—there’s a new interface to learn and new features to understand. Effective customer enablement provides resources like product tutorials, onboarding sessions, and dedicated support channels that guide new users through these challenges, ensuring they quickly grasp how to use the product. This helps them become more confident in using the software, ultimately driving higher product adoption.

Boosted customer loyalty

When customers receive an outstanding CX and see your product’s full value, they are likely to stick around. This is because you are meeting their needs, and they see first-hand how your product makes a difference. Prioritizing customer enablement can boost loyalty by ensuring that customers fully understand the value of a product or service. Customers are more likely to be satisfied when they have the right tools, knowledge, and support to solve their problems. Additionally, customers who feel supported are less likely to switch to competitors and more likely to advocate for the brand, further solidifying their loyalty.

Decreased support interactions

A key pillar of customer enablement is self-service resources like FAQ pages and help articles. When businesses create helpful assets, customers can solve their problems independently. This limits the need for consumers to reach out to customer support, decreasing the amount of support tickets and freeing up your team to focus on more important tasks.

Examples of customer enablement

You can perform customer enablement in several ways, and to illustrate, we’ll dive into two examples.

Zendesk

At Zendesk, we offer a robust training program for users who want to become more proficient in using our products. While we pride ourselves on being easy to use, we know that any new technology can be daunting at first. So, whether you’re an admin, agent, or member of the sales team, we have an abundance of resources that can assist you in your role. We even offer Zendesk certification programs that allow you to reach your desired level of expertise.

HyperJar

Another example is HyperJar, a mobile banking app that used Zendesk AI to cut first response times by 94 percent. The team utilized virtual assistants to provide instant product support, help customers replace lost cards, assist with charge disputes, and handle other similar account questions. This enhanced enablement gave them a 97 percent customer satisfaction (CSAT) score.

Customer enablement vs. sales enablement

While they are similar concepts—some organizations even describe customer enablement as the “other side of the coin” to sales enablement—there are a few key differences between them.

Customer enablement focuses on the customer or end user. This strategy aims to help them understand and realize the full value of your product or service through self-service resources, training materials, and comprehensive customer support.

Sales enablement focuses on sales reps. This strategy helps them close more deals by developing sales content, engaging in ongoing training, and providing other support to increase revenue.

Customer enablement best practices

If you want to provide effective customer enablement, you need to adopt a few key strategies. Here are a few of our most important best practices.

Embrace AI and automation

AI tools can upgrade your customer enablement strategy by helping you provide instant and comprehensive support. For example, advanced chatbots like AI agents can offer nonstop service to your consumers. They can communicate just like human agents, resolve a wide range of customer requests from start to finish, and act as an extension of your brand voice.

Decision-makers are noting the power of AI in the workplace. According to the Zendesk AI-Powered CX Trends Report 2024, 70 percent of CX leaders believe that AI agents are becoming skilled architects of highly personalized customer journeys.

If a consumer reaches out to your team with a product question, the AI agent can answer it, provide a helpful resource in the chat, or escalate the ticket to a human agent if necessary. They can also identify gaps in your knowledge base content and suggest new help articles based on common support ticket interactions. This ensures your customer-facing resources are always helpful and up to date.

Adopt a customer-first approach

Being customer first means putting the user at the center of your decision-making rather than focusing on products or profits. With this approach, you will start to ask yourself questions like:

• If I needed training resources, how would I find them?

• Are my resources helpful and actionable?

• If I had a follow-up question on what I just read or saw, would it be easy to find the answer I needed?

• Can I connect with an AI or human agent easily?

Once you start thinking like a customer, you’ll naturally make better decisions to improve your CX.

Educate customers

In addition to offering self-service resources, provide comprehensive training, demos, webinars, and video lessons to help buyers achieve their goals. These assets can help them with the initial product onboarding process and ongoing support. Customers who feel confident using your product or service will become more invested in it and your brand.

Build customer communities

Online customer communities allow buyers to tell their stories and build connections with other users and your company. They also allow users to learn from one another by crowdsourcing answers to questions and sharing their thoughts.

Provide customers with a community forum or other online space to troubleshoot issues with like-minded users, and you’ll reduce the need for them to submit support tickets. In turn, you’ll reduce your agents’ workload, freeing them up to handle complex customer issues and create enablement resources. These communities can also enable two-way conversations between your customers and your business, fostering brand advocacy.

Encourage and implement customer feedback

When you encourage customer feedback, you give support and customer success teams the data they need to improve their CX. Doing so also helps you discover any knowledge gaps among your customers to determine how to strengthen your enablement.

A Net Promoter Score® (NPS) survey is an effective way to do this. NPS measures customer loyalty by asking the user if they would recommend your product or service to others. This type of feedback provides powerful insights into your customers’ level of engagement with your products and services. Your teams can also use this data to tweak the portions of your customer enablement process that may be confusing users.

Frequently asked questions

Enhance your customer enablement with Zendesk

Customer enablement is a key strategy that can help build long-term relationships. Using a combination of AI, knowledge base resources, and customer-first thinking, teams can be there for their customers every step of the way. But to successfully deploy these resources, you need the right partner—you need Zendesk. Our CX capabilities can help you create meaningful connections with your users and enhance your customer enablement efforts.

Learn more about how Zendesk can help your organization.

Net Promoter, Net Promoter Score, and NPS are registered trademarks of Satmetrix Systems, Inc., Bain & Company, Inc., and Fred Reichheld