Mastering Customer Enablement: 6 Best Practices for SaaS Teams

Ever tried assembling a complex piece of furniture with just a vague manual? Frustrating, isn't it?

Now, imagine if you had a friendly expert guiding you at every step.

That's what customer enablement does for your SaaS users. It's not just about handing them the tools; it's about teaching them how to use those tools to build something amazing.

In this article, we'll explore how SaaS teams can leverage customer enablement to turn confused users into confident builders—and in the process, create loyal customers who are as passionate about your product as you are.

Keep reading to learn more about:

• What is customer enablement?
• 5 reasons why PLG teams need a customer enablement strategy
• How to build your customer service enablement setup: 6 best practices to follow
• Build your tech stack with these 5 customer enablement software

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What is customer enablement?

Customer enablement focuses on giving your users the resources, tools, and training to effectively use your product. It goes beyond the initial onboarding process and continues throughout the entire customer lifecycle.

The goal of customer enablement is to help users find value in your product quickly, which in turn can increase retention and loyalty.

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Customer enablement vs. Customer support

Customer enablement differs from customer support in several ways. While customer support typically involves reactive assistance in response to specific issues or problems that users encounter, customer enablement is a more proactive and comprehensive approach. It's about empowering customers to use a product or service effectively, which can help prevent issues from arising in the first place.

Moreover, customer enablement often involves a focus on education and learning, with the aim of helping customers become more self-sufficient and capable of solving problems on their own.

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5 reasons why PLG teams need a customer enablement strategy

Not sure if customer experience enablement is worth the time and effort? These five reasons will show you the ROI of building an airtight strategy for customer enablement:

1. Accelerate Time-to-Value: A clear onboarding flow, self-serve support, and proactive in-app guidance can help users quickly understand how to navigate your product effectively and achieve their desired outcomes. This can boost customer satisfaction and minimize the time it takes users to start experiencing the actual product value.
2. Drive Product Adoption/Usage: When use have the knowledge to effectively use your product and troubleshoot issues whenever they get stuck, they’re more likely to become active users and incorporate your product in their workflows. A customer enablement strategy increases user engagement and encourages them to fully leverage your product’s capabilities.
3. Improve Customer Satisfaction: A customer enablement strategy helps in empowering users to solve problems instantly and find answers on demand. This builds a strong foundation for your relationship with every user and consistently improves satisfaction levels.
4. Support Upselling and Cross-Selling: Consistently engaging your users and understanding their evolving needs can help you identify opportunities for upselling higher plans or cross-selling complementary products/features. When customers are convinced of the value of these additional offerings, they’re more likely to expand their usage and investment in your product.
5. Promote Customer Advocacy: When customers are successful with your product, they can become advocates for the company. Your customer marketing team can encourage them to share their success stories, provide testimonials, refer new customers, or contribute to case studies. This will build strong customer advocacy for your brand and gain trust in the market.

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How to build your customer service enablement setup: 6 best practices to follow

If you’re ready to reap the reward of customer success enablement and build your strategy, these six best practices will guide you along the way.

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1. Use microlearning for effective customer training

Microlearning delivers short, focused, and easily digestible bursts of information to customers. It breaks down complex product workflows into smaller modules, allowing users to learn and retain more information without feeling overwhelmed.

Microlearning essentially helps users overcome information overload and promotes continuous learning. This bite-sized, targeted content is great for designing a seamless onboarding experience.

You can also use this snackable content to enable users to solve critical problems or troubleshoot issues quickly and independently.

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⚒️ Tips to implement

1. Identify key training topics based on support tickets and user feedback.
2. Divide each topic into smaller, self-contained modules for ease of consumption.
3. Create rich and engaging content with a mix of media such as text, images, videos, and interactive elements.
4. Deliver these microlearning resources through a dedicated customer portal or learning management system (LMS).
5. Offer self-paced learning options to accommodate different learning preferences and schedules.

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2. Provide comprehensive self-serve resources on demand

Which of these two options would you choose as an end-user:

a. Slow, frustrating response with a long wait time

b. Quick, just-in-time answers, available on demand

The most likely response is the latter.

The logic is simple: when end-users can find solutions quickly on their own, they wouldn’t want to wait for hours (or days) to get on a call with a customer support agent.

This is why you need to build a robust library of customer self-serve resources, such as knowledge base articles, in-app guides, FAQs, and product tours. Empower users to quickly access the information they need and ditch the need to send long emails or wait for calls.

This ultimately fosters a sense of autonomy and self-sufficiency, enhancing the overall customer experience. Plus, as your customer base grows, self-serve resources will reduce the strain on your support team and help them focus on more complex issues.

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⚒️ Tips to implement

1. Create a knowledge base: Develop a centralized knowledge base that serves as a repository of articles, how-to guides, and training videos. Organize it into easily navigable categories and ensure the content is up to date—in line with your product updates.

2. Offer video tutorials: Create product explainer videos that visually demonstrate how to use specific features, perform common tasks, and solve problems. Upload them on your help center or create a video knowledge base on YouTube for quick discoverability. Here’s how we host our knowledge base videos on YouTube:

‍3. Implement a robust search functionality: Ensure the self-serve resources have a powerful search functionality that enables users to quickly find relevant content using keywords.‍

4. Provide contextual help within the product: Embed contextual help resources, tooltips, or guided tours directly within your product interface to assist users as they navigate and use different features.

5. Gather user feedback: Regularly collect feedback from users to identify gaps in the self-serve resources and make necessary updates and improvements. Consider implementing user ratings or comments to gather insights.

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3. Turn customers into champions to promote your business

If you give users a great onboarding experience but leave them to figure out the rest of your product on their own, you're doing it wrong.

You have to nurture meaningful relationships with every customer and turn them into product champions. These champions actively advocate for your business, share positive experiences, and refer new users to drive business growth.

These brand advocates can generate positive word-of-mouth and increase brand visibility and awareness among their networks. When satisfied customers publicly endorse your product, it serves as social proof and encourages potential customers to check it out.

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⚒️ Tips to implement

1. Identify potential champions: Monitor user interactions and look for users who demonstrate high satisfaction, engagement, and positive sentiment toward your product.
2. Build relationships: Hire a customer marketer to engage with these customers on a personal level, acknowledging their support and expressing gratitude for their positive experiences.
3. Offer incentives: Provide exclusive benefits, discounts, or rewards to champions as a token of appreciation for their advocacy.
4. Create branded content: Give your champions the resources they need to promote your product, such as social media kits and branded content.
5. Facilitate customer stories: Encourage champions to share their success stories or experiences through testimonials, case studies, or video interviews.

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4. Implement a community-driven approach to customer service

A community-driven approach to customer service works best with a platform or space where your users can actively engage with each other, ask questions, share insights, and provide support. It leverages the collective knowledge and experiences of your customer base to enhance their overall experience.

Users can share their expertise and best practices to deliver peer-to-peer support. This can reduce the burden on your support team and create a sense of collaboration and empowerment among users.

More importantly, this community can serve as a valuable source of feedback, ideas, and insights for product improvements and future developments.

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⚒️ Tips to implement

1. Choose a community platform, such as a forum, discussion board, or online community tool, to host the user community.
2. Organize the community into categories or topics that align with your product features, use cases, or customer interests to facilitate focused discussions.
3. Provide valuable and engaging content to kick-start the community and encourage participation.
4. Actively invite customers to join the community and offer incentives or recognition for valuable contributions.
5. Encourage customers to ask questions, seek advice, and provide support to each other.

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5. Monitor user behavior and offer customized upsell opportunities

Stay on top of how customers interact with your SaaS product to learn more about their usage patterns, preferences, and needs. Use these insights to identify relevant product upgrades or additional features that align with each user’s specific requirements and create customized upsell or cross-sell offers.

Customized upsell opportunities that genuinely add value to the customer's experience can lead to higher satisfaction and stronger customer relationships.

By aligning upsell opportunities with the customer's usage patterns and demonstrating how the additional features or upgrades can enhance their experience or address their pain points, you can effectively communicate the value of the upsell.

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⚒️ Tips to implement

1. Implement user tracking and analytics to monitor user behavior within your product, such as feature usage, time spent on different areas, or engagement metrics.
2. Identify specific user actions or milestones that indicate a potential opportunity for upselling.
3. Segment customers based on their usage patterns, preferences, and needs to create targeted segments for personalized upsell offers.
4. Proactively present the upsell offers within the product through in-app messaging, notifications, or banners.
5. Continuously analyze the results of your upsell efforts, monitor conversion rates, and gather customer feedback to optimize your approach over time.

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6. Collect, analyze, and incorporate customer feedback proactively

The best way to implement customer experience enablement is by actively seeking input from customers regarding their experiences, satisfaction levels, and suggestions for improvement.

Meet users where they are—social media, in-app, email, ticketing platform, etc.— to gather valuable insights from them. Implementing this feedback can show your commitment to enhancing the overall user experience based on their needs and requests.

You can also make customers feel heard and valued by implementing their feedback. The result? A sense of loyalty and higher customer retention.

This customer-centric approach and tailored solutions can also become a key differentiator for your brand and create a positive reputation.

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⚒️ Tips to implement

1. Establish feedback collection channels: Implement various channels for collecting customer feedback, such as surveys, feedback forms, customer interviews, social media monitoring, or dedicated feedback portals.
2. Use targeted and specific questions: Craft well-designed feedback mechanisms with targeted and specific questions to gather actionable insights.
3. Regularly analyze feedback data: Dedicate time to analyze the collected feedback data, identify patterns, trends, and areas for improvement.
4. Prioritize feedback themes: Group feedback based on common themes or issues to identify the most critical areas that require attention.
5. Develop an action plan: Based on the feedback analysis, create an action plan that outlines specific steps to address the identified areas of improvement.
6. Communicate updates and improvements: Engage with customers by communicating how their feedback has been incorporated and share new feature updates or improvements resulting from their input.

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Build your tech stack with these 5 customer enablement software

Executing all these tactics can be too much work. But the right tools can make life easy for you and streamline your customer enablement efforts.

Let’s look at the five must-have customer enablement tools in your stack:

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1. Self-serve resources: Floik

Floik is a robust tool for creating self-serve support resources for your product. It eliminates the need to stitch multiple screenshots together for creating customer support guides.

Instead, you can simple capture a task on your screen and Floik will convert it into a step-by-step guide, complete with annotated screenshots and editable steps. Here’s a how-to guide created using Floik 👇🏻

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You can instantly convert these guides into a video—or record one from scratch. With Floik, you can create product explainer videos for any query or concern.

Record just your screen or add your talking head on the corner; go with your original voiceover or generate AI voiceover with your script—the options are endless! You can trim, crop, and transcribe videos. Plus, add a custom CTA to guide users about the next steps.

Once you’re done, download the video or embed them anywhere (like this 👇🏻)

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2. In-app guidance: Pendo

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Pendo is an in-app guidance tool to provide interactive and personalized experiences within your product. With Pendo, you can create engaging walkthroughs, feature tooltips, and product announcements inside your app.

The tool helps with smooth onboarding for new users, facilitates product adoption by highlighting key features, and offers contextual guidance to ensure users get the most out of your software. By delivering targeted information on demand, Pendo can reduce friction and increases user satisfaction.

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3. Ticketing platform: Zendesk

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Zendesk is a comprehensive ticketing platform designed to streamline customer support and reduce time to resolution. It centralizes customer inquiries, support tickets, and communication channels, enabling support teams to efficiently manage and prioritize customer issues.

Zendesk offers features like ticket tracking, automation, and knowledge base integration to enhance productivity and ensure timely and effective responses to customer queries. With its robust ticket management capabilities, analytics, and reporting functionalities, Zendesk is the ultimate solution to deliver exceptional customer service.

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4. Community forum: Threado

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Threado is a community management platform for facilitating customer engagement, knowledge sharing, and peer-to-peer support. It helps you set up a dedicated space for your users to ask questions, share insights, and collaborate with each other.

Threado enables SaaS companies to create vibrant communities where users can connect, seek help, and contribute their expertise. Use this tool to strengthen customer relationships and cultivates a valuable resource for ongoing customer enablement and support.

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5. Feedback collection: Hotjar

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Hotjar is a powerful feedback collection tool for you to gather insights on customer behavior and preferences. It offers features such as surveys, polls, heatmaps, and session recordings to capture feedback and understand how users interact with your website or application.

Hotjar allows you to collect quantitative and qualitative data, measure user sentiment, identify pain points, and gain valuable insights into user experiences. By analyzing this feedback, you can make data-driven decisions, make product improvements, and optimize user journeys to maximize customer delight.

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Leverage customer enablement to lock in users for the long run

Unlocking long-term customer loyalty and success is the key goal of customer enablement for SaaS companies. By following best practices like providing comprehensive training, proactive support, and fostering a vibrant customer community, SaaS companies can help customers get value quickly, adopt the product, and enjoy a great experience.

By prioritizing customer enablement, SaaS companies can ensure customer retention, drive growth, and position themselves for sustained success in the competitive SaaS landscape.

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