Every Saas Company Needs to Do Customer Enablement. Here Are the Top 5 Best Practices to Customer Enablement Which  Every Saas Companies Must Use.

Customers are the root of your business, keep nourishing.

Are you keeping a tap on your customer’s post-purchase journey? To maintain a customer experience that recurs more than just a one-time sell-out, you need a strategic approach that focuses on every stage of your customer’s life cycle.

Addressing each customer’s need will create a personalized atmosphere where it feels like home and even imagines exploring other regions of your products and services.

In this blog, you’ll learn how customer enablement is a steering wheel to your onboarding programs and employ: 5 Best Practices for Customer Enablement for every SaaS company.

Use the Table of Content to Navigate The Guide.

• What Is Customer Enablement?
• Why Do You Need Customer Enablement In Saas Companies?
• How A Successful Customer Enablement Strategy Improves Long-Term Customer Retention?
• Top 5 Best Practices For Customer Enablement For SaaS Companies.

 

Step 1: What is Customer Enablement?

Customer Enablement is a form of the execution process, where you ensure to provide three essential tools to your customer when they buy your products & services.

Your Customer Onboarding, designed to enhance customer retention works frictionlessly once your overall customer experience strategies capture these three aspects from the initial stage of your customer’s journey.

Each customer has a different set of expectations for your products. Invest your time & energy in implying technical landscape to drip down groups of various people – behaviors, specific needs, engagement patterns, and product usage limitations – In short, a virtual walkthrough.

Then, develop learning styles on an intuitive-based platform to support different patterns of customer’s specific needs & expectations from your products.

Step 2: Why Do You Need Customer Enablement in Saas Companies?

Why is your customer expecting a delightful experience while using your product? Isn’t the product itself a solution? Not until the customer is fully aware of ‘how to use it thoroughly.

Especially for Software as a service (SaaS) Organizations, where products require an educative edge to be used by customers in their entirety – hence, enabling customers becomes a constant need for your subscription-based business model.

Once your customers are rolling the dice – it should be your board, showing them the lucky numbers they want to see. In simple words, if you’re strategically putting efforts into your post-sale customer experience – onboarding programs, customer enablement secures your customer’s entire life cycle since the initial stage.

¹. Source: Epsilon, “New Epsilon Research indicates 80% of customers are more likely to make a purchase when brands offer a personalized experience.” January 9, 2018 ². Source: Forrestor Analytics Business Technographics Global Data & Analytics Survey, 2019.

 

So, ensuring that your customers are flowing towards their personalized expectations from your product, customer loyalty comes as a progressive outcome.

And when customer loyalty is maintained, you have successfully matured them into your brand advocates.

Step 3: How a Successful Customer Enablement Strategy Improves Long-Term Customer Retention?

As an organization, you decided to invest in improving your customer’s experience – which means essentially you want your customer to feel at home when they opt for you as a brand.

Because customer’s comfort lies within the way – they seek any solution – the process until their final win.

When Industries started acknowledging the customer’s overall journey, the process became imperative, and customer success programs emerged as a marketing strategy.

Still, many organizations unable to propose successful customer retention programs because they all ensured ‘creating’ but left hanging loose ends of ‘keeping’ the strategy alive.

Successful Customer Enablement Focuses on:

• Delivering Personalized Experience for Diverse Customer’s
• Tailored Innovative Solutions
• Empathetic & Reliable Customer Support
• Ensured Customer Growth

These metrics allow your customer to grow their own valuable e-learning space that interests their win. Hence, long-term loyalty becomes an outcome of the entire experience.

Step 4: Top 5 Best Practices for Customer Enablement for SaaS Companies.

Now that you are aware of the basics of customer enablement. Let’s understand, key factors that orient in successful customer enablement. Here are some customer education best practices mentioned below:

Customer Education Best Practices

• Reading Your Customer Wants & Needs.
• Design An Easy-to-communicate Platform: Resource & Tools.
• Bring The Atmosphere Of Customer Growth: Clarity Is A Treat.
• The Touch Of Sensitivity: Reliable & Empathetic Support.
• Now, Keep Maturing The Process: Feedbacks & Surveys.

Reading Your Customer Wants & Needs.

Your customers are the key ingredient: through guided empowerment & resourceful support, they can convince even the most skeptical buyer to purchase your services.

But, to do so, first, you must ensure that your customer’s foot is in the right pair of your shoes. Now, understanding your customer’s persona becomes imperative, so keep these pointers ready for your long whiteboard sessions.

How To Read Your Customers In 4 Simple Steps.

• Employ Technology (Intuitive Data Absorption)
• Understand Your Customer: Behaviour Pattern + Engagement Choice + Churn Points + Final Win Expectations
• Group Them Into Different ‘wants & needs from your product.
• Design An Easy-To-Communicate Learning space for each group.

Design an Easy-to-communicate Platform: Resource & Tools.

Easing the communication bar increases transparency amongst the customer’s community & your team leading to less churn caused. And to design a platform that manages different groups of customer’s needs, you need proper resources & tools that will allow specificity to diversity.

Starting with introducing technology as your landscape, you can use video hosting tools to provide a virtual tour of your new course or even your product overview.

Exercise marketing and messaging to enhance customer’s engagement with your brand. You can use in-app messages or automated email acquainting about your new products.

Keep in mind to employ your organization’s specific LMS (Learning Management System) to deliver & track your overall training that emphasizes learning. LMS is a software solution that acts like an inclusive touch-point maintaining the entire ecosystem.

What Does A Learning Management System (LMS) Offer?

• Course Authoring Tools
• Marketing Automation & Messaging
• Data Integration
• AI-Enabled Performance Support
• Achievable Analytics & Useful In Critical Decision-Making.

Bring the Atmosphere Of Customer Growth: Clarity is a Treat.

Creating a progressive aura around customers envisions them to have a full-grown self-awareness image with your brand. This intensity of clarity will produce a sweet appetite for your customers to stick to their current stage with focus.

Once your platform allows space for clarity, bring reliable support to administer roadblocks that your customer might face during their learning process.

Grow your community as it gets critical for customers to socialize with their buyer’s journey and share their progress and even difficulties – Less Customer Churn. Host networking events, forums, and social media groups to enable higher customer engagement that leads to authentic conversions.

Also, you can take benefit of a customer referral program with a social community to create a better engagement with your product.

The Touch Of Sensitivity: Reliable & Empathetic Support.

When a customer faces a problem, they expect a fast & quick solution. Your dedicated support team is essential to ensure that customer problem are resolved quickly & without causing churn.

Focus on creating reliable support that acts to a given situation with more sensitivity – Because handling problems with empathy – create personal grounds as a problem is close to customers.

Employ social media that is becoming a popular medium for businesses to provide generic and even technical instant support to their customers.

Enable a support ticket system and keep in touch with customer’s sentiments within the community – the best or the worst experience. It helps to cover the room for improvement within the ongoing learning process.

Now, Keep Maturing The Process: Feedbacks & Surveys.

Once you accomplish these four metrics, you have successfully enabled customers towards your brand. Now, it’s time to gather suggestions & room for improvement for your product & customer success team.

Incorporate customer feedback into your services roadmap. Incorporate customer feedback into your services roadmap. And, stay in close touch with the needs & changing demands of your customers.

Collecting satisfaction data allows your team to have a clear idea about what to prioritize in future development.

Conclusion:

Empowering customers is an investment that every SaaS company must think about because to each product, a slope of education is an imperative need of the hour. So, it needs to include SaaS customer support.

So, once you accomplish customer enablement as an initial measure in your onboarding process, you will realize how crucial it gets to build an effective customer engine.

Employ above mentioned best practices for successful customer enablement. And, also explore our upcoming reasonable blog explaining: Why SaaS Companies Must Invest in Customer Training?

Stay in touch.

Before going deep into this blog “Why Customer Training is Key to Successful Customer Enablement?”, let’s have a brief knowledge about Customer Training.

If your organization is a fast-growing SaaS, PaaS, or ISV product company or an established global enterprise and planning to achieve more than 2X growth in coming years, then understanding the essentials of customer training is one of the key considerations for you. If you’re in charge of customer training, customer success, or customer enablement training within your organization you’ve come to the right place. We have summed up the key essentials for you which you should consider before you begin to strategize your Customer Training program.

What is Customer Training?

Customer Training (also referred to as Customer Education) is a well-structured training program designed keeping in mind your new or existing customers in view. A successful customer training program is an amalgamation of various types of content (videos, eLearning, Pdf, Ppt, HTML, Webinar) delivered in a very pragmatic way via self-paced mode or in-person or virtual mode. For most visionary companies this is one of the most important steps to boost their positioning from customer satisfaction to customer delight.

Who Must Think of Customer Training as a Priority?

Any company which is customer-focused and believes in the “Customer Delight” philosophy must think of customer training as one of their key arsenals to be top in the lot. It is a well-rooted myth amongst the young start-ups’ or even with some of the established enterprises that customer training can be thought only once a specific growth is achieved. Contrary to that if you pick up any good start-up which has grown exponentially, you will find “Customer Education” was one of the key differentiators for them distinguishing them from the competition.

So, if you are a fast-growing SaaS, PaaS, ISV product company, or an established enterprise you must be considering customer training as the essential enabler to increase your product adoption and increase customer retention.

Some of the regular use cases which should act as a trigger for you to think of investing in customer education are:

• SaaS companies with complex modules or features.
• PaaS companies with multiple workflows.
• Products with complex workflows and customized processes.
• Complex value SaaS companies.
• High value or costly products where the user needs to train before start using the product.
• Products that are highly agile and frequently release new features.
• Companies focused on customer centricity and want to reduce support ticket volume.

Why Customer Training?

The chances of trained customers becoming advocates of your product are always higher than a non-trained customer. So having the right customer training process makes all the difference. Customer training if done correctly helps to improve customer retention leading to positive business outcomes. With a diversified userbase for your product, it becomes extremely important to address your customer’s pain points related to the usage of your product in the quickest and most efficient manner. And have a well-defined customer education strategy is the key to success to strengthen your brand loyalty.

Key Benefits of Customer Training

Customer Training if done correctly and with the right approach can do wonders for your company.

Benefits of Customer Enablement Training

Key benefits of customer training are:

1. Onboard Customer with Excitement.

• Initial customer onboarding drives further customer success. Take away the hurdles from your customer journey in the first go.

2. Enhance Product Adoption.

• Customized training path created suiting to the needs of your customer reduces the initial hick-ups in understanding your product and boosts user confidence in your product leading to a better adoption.

3. Increase Revenue & Reduce Customer Success Cost.

• If customer training is done correctly it helps to reduce the overall training cost by almost 80% and increases the chances of customer retention drastically.

4. Gain Business Insights with Specific Analytics & Data.

• Customer training can provide some amazing business analytics that can help you to identify which features your customers are liking and which they are finding difficulty in understanding. This data can be further be consumed by the product team, a customer success team, support team to work on.

5. Reduce Dependency on Your Support Team Or Customer Success Team.

• As the customer gets access to any time training, they can go through each section, again and again, reducing their dependency on your team.

6. Reduction in Customer Support Queries.

• Statistics indicate that a well-executed customer education program can reduce the customer support queries by almost more than 35% allowing you to free your bandwidth to support more customers with the same bandwidth.

Customer Training Best Practices

By now you must have understood the how and why of the customer training program. Here are some best practices you can consider while implementing your customer training program:

1. Find Your “Why”?

Try to answer your “Why”. Why do you need to do customer training? The best way to initiate this process is to speak cross-department, try and understand what challenges your customer is sharing with your CS team, sales team, support team. What can make your customer’s life easy?

2. Set Smart Goals.

Once your Why is set, try to set SMART goals. This will ensure setting up the right expectations with each stakeholder and ensure that your training program is on track always

3. Define Your Content Strategy.

For any program to be successful, having the right content strategy in place is very important. Decide on what type of content your customer is looking for. Once it is fixed decide on the formats in which this content should be made available. Some of the commonly used formats are videos, Pdf, Ppt, HTML, SCORM, recorded webinars, etc. You can also adopt for virtual training strategy using VILT modes.

4. Choose the Right Technology.

Chose the right technology to partner with to deliver these training programs. There are many purposes to build SaaS-based customer training software that will allow you to keep your cost low in the initial phase.

5. Run A Pilot (MVP).

Once everything is set, run a small pilot with few chosen customers, seek feedback from key stakeholders and make the necessary amendments (if required) and plan a big rollout. Make sure you make a good communication plan in collaboration with your marketing team to announce this to your customer. Surprise your customers with an amazing customer training program

6. Track & Measure the Effectiveness.

Once rolled out customer education must be a regular process. Keep tracking and measuring the effectiveness of each program for each customer and keep improving every day. The agile approach will help to achieve supreme customer delight over a period.

Examples of Customer Training

Some of the great examples of customer training are

• Salesforce Academy.
• Pega.
• HubSpot.
• UI Path.
• ServiceNow.
• Automation Anywhere.
• Blue prism.
• Freshdesk.
• Antworks.
• Zoho.

Conclusion:

Providing a delightful customer training experience is one of the important steps in delivering an unmatched customer experience. This simple yet powerful initiative can add great value for your customers and ensures that you build lifelong advocates for your product. One happy customer leads to ten new leads and ultimately opportunities for upselling and cross-selling. Your customers will surely appreciate your customer-centricity and enjoy the journey with you.

We at CXchery breathe in, breathe out this daily with our hundreds of customers and we will be happy to extend our passport to aspiring organizations to help them to set up this initiative collaboratively. Don’t hesitate to write back in case if you are looking for some additional information, template guides to set up this initiative. Happy Customer Training!!!!