Closing a sale can feel like crossing a finish line. But it also marks the beginning of your efforts to retain the customer as a long-term client. This gets complicated since 73% of consumers will switch to a competitor after more than one bad experience with a company.
It’s why successful businesses focus on customer success enablement. This article explores why that’s true while highlighting some actionable tips your company can use to leverage the concept to its benefit.
So let’s get into it.
What Is Customer Success Enablement and Why Does It Matter?
The core principle of customer success enablement is ensuring customers have the resources, tools, and support they need to use your company’s products successfully. Note that this is different from sales enablement, which focuses on empowering internal sales teams rather than external end-users.
Customer success enablement matters because it leads to better experiences with your products. This, in turn, should create higher levels of customer satisfaction and more loyal clients. But you’ll need the right customer success enablement strategy to enjoy those benefits.
Creating Your Customer Success Enablement Strategy
Now that you know why customer success enablement is important, let’s get to work on your company’s strategy. These tips will get you started.
Set Customers Up for Success Early
Onboarding is a core pillar of a successful customer enablement strategy. It sets the tone for your relationship with the client and helps them get value out of your product as soon as possible.
You can use onboarding platforms if you want help with creating an ideal onboarding process. Or, identify onboarding friction points and bottlenecks on your own and take proactive action to ensure customers aren’t impacted by them.
Embrace SMART Tasks
Customer support can be a significant bottleneck in the onboarding process. New clients will need constant assistance if you don’t already have a strong process in place.
It’s why SMART tasks are important. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound. It’s an organizing principle you can follow to create a more effective onboarding process that customers can complete on their own.
SMART tasks direct customers through a learning objective that is specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. This helps the user understand what they’re meant to learn, and how long it’s going to take and splits the overall learning goal into a more bite-sized, achievable objective. It could be the secret to reducing support wait times for new clients.
Improve Customer Visibility
Next up – focus on improving customer visibility while onboarding. You want every user to know where they stand in the overall learning journey so they can track their progress in real time.
You can also empower users to take actions based on their progress. For example, when a new client completes your foundational onboarding process, you can automatically recommend that they get started on the advanced lessons.
This practice encourages autonomy and self-sufficiency. The more visibility your customers have, the easier it will be for them to make consistent progress toward their overall learning goals.
Establish clear communication channels
Even with the best onboarding process in place, customers will still have questions they need your help answering. You want to make that as easy as possible for them so they can get their answer quickly and get back to work.
You need clear communication channels in place to make that happen. This means sharing contact information for different support people or teams in clear places and ensuring that responses go out promptly.
Regularly update and optimize the customer onboarding portal
Finally, it’s also important to note that your ideal customer onboarding portal today may not be the same tomorrow. Evolutions in how customers use your products and consume information can change your optimal onboarding setup over time.
That’s why we recommend tracking how customers use your portal over time, and then analyzing the data to find new opportunities for improvement. You can also solicit user feedback directly to get their suggestions.
Creating this type of continuous feedback loop will ensure your customer onboarding process only gets better in the long run.
Unlock the Power of Customer Success Enablement with OnRamp
Customer success enablement is about giving clients the tools, guides, and resources they need to learn your product faster and more independently. Doing so can free up time for your team to focus on other important tasks and improve customer loyalty over time.
Setting up an excellent onboarding process is the best way to leverage customer success enablement to your company’s benefit. But that can be complicated to do on your own, which is why we made OnRamp.
OnRamp is an all-in-one customer onboarding platform with tools for guiding customers through every phase of their onboarding journey. Sign up for a demo to learn more about how we can help.
