What is Customer Enablement and How to Implement It

Purchasing a product is only the start of the customer journey with your company. Real success comes when people benefit from its usage. 

Thus, your manager's task is to help users succeed at each step. This can involve proactive assistance in optimizing the solution to their needs, webinars on feature setup, integration video guides explaining how to integrate the client's tools, support with issues resolution via live chat or chatbot, etc. All these are elements of the customer enablement strategy.

What is it? Why does your company need it? How to create one? Find answers to these questions in our guide 👇

What is Customer Enablement? 

Customer enablement refers to a strategic process in which company managers educate new users on achieving their goals independently with a product or service by offering them relevant templates, guides, training program, and tools.

Here is how it typically works:

Let’s say you are the marketer who just paid for a service to an FAQ chatbot that would assist your pricing page visitors. So, where to start? The admin panel looks tricky, and you don’t have enough experience building chatbots… But in seconds, you get a popup explaining the interface and the first step of integrating your website with a service. 

Finally, you landed the chatbot builder full of ready-made templates. Thus, everything you have to do is just change the copy. A few minutes and the chatbot is ready 🎉 

While working in the visual editor, you receive an email with a list of best practices for the chatbot launch. But it turned out harder than it seemed, so you contacted the company manager with this question. He provided a detailed solution, so finally, your chatbot is live!  

It looks similar to what a customer success manager or sales enablement agent does. Is it the same?

The terms are indeed related. But they aren’t the same thing. Here is why 👇

Customer Enablement vs. Sales Enablement 

Both processes are about making customers happy. The main difference is the journey stage. Sales enablement focuses on providing potential clients with all the necessary resources to lead them to purchase. After that, a customer enablement manager comes into play, ensuring users’ success with a product. 

But if customer enablement is about user success, can we name it just customer success?

No👇

Customer Enablement vs. Customer Success 

These two share the same goal, but the ways they achieve it are different. Thus, while the customer enablement team is more about educational content, the customer success focus is 1-to-1 real-time communication with a client. 

The best thing is that they ideally work in tandem: the customer success team actively uses resources created by the customer enablement team.

Here we highlighted the product onboarding content creation part, which is some of the customer support agent tasks. But again, it is not the same👇

Customer enablement vs. customer support 

As mentioned, creating knowledge base content is really a part of a customer support agent routine. But it is only a small part of what they do when 70-90% is about communicating with users via chat, phone, or email. 

The most significant difference between customer enablement and support is in the focus of their activities. The first one drives product adoption, while the second is all about troubleshooting.  

That’s why customer enablement should be a separate department within your organization. The better it works, the more customers achieve their goals with your product. But what does it bring for a company?

Why Customer Enablement Is A Must For Your Company In 2025

Let’s start with the first and the most obvious result it leads to 👇

• Customer satisfaction
  With a correct customer enablement strategy, there is no chance for users to get stuck at some point in product setup or implementation. Due to proactive, personalized recommendations on using it in all possible forms, they became product experts in no time. That means faster time to value and higher customer satisfaction at each process step which also means another effective method of digital transformation for SMBs.
• Growing customer retention and loyalty
  Achieving desired goals without any frustrations in the process is the best foundation for growing customer loyalty to your brand. Such people are more likely to share positive feedback and recommend your product or service online. 
• Increased Revenue
  Since people tend to repeat a positive experience, after implementing customer enablement, companies have higher customer retention. According to stats, it can bring you 6.2% revenue growth.
• Resources Optimization
  On top of better upsells, a well-designed customer enablement strategy drives a 6.1% decrease in support costs. Since users already know how to use the product, they can resolve minor issues on their own and explain severe problems more correctly, which increases the time for their resolution. 

Examples of How Companies Implement Customer Enablement 

In practice, customer success enablement takes multiple forms. Usually, companies choose only some of them, like combining written tutorials with occasional product webinars or focusing only on product courses. 

Here are two cases we like: 

Assignar 

This construction operations command center regularly does webinars on best implementing their product. 

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The second type of content they use is educational articles on the company blog.

Image source: Semrush This SEO service is famous for its high-quality courses that educate users on how to use the product. According to customer goals, there is a rich choice: basic SEO, international SEO, link building, content marketing, PPC ads, etc. 

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Trello 

Each user of this task management service can start their project much faster by choosing one of the ready-made templates. All of them are categorized and easy to customize.

Image source. 

Top 5 Best Practices on How to Create Customer Enablement Strategy 

Here, we collected some of the best recommendations to remember when creating your customer enablement program. 

1. Store all the information in one place

Create a space where your service or product user could find all the relevant information. It can be a knowledge base or academy where all the tutorials, webinars, and courses are stored. Don’t forget to add its link to your website menu, so everyone can quickly navigate and find the best solution to their needs. 

Here is what it looks like: 

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Alternatively, you can also find a reliable presentation design service and ask professionals to make eye-catching and informative presentations with all relevant information which you can send to your customers with a few clicks.

2. Sync with sales enablement managers  

It is essential to provide the same excellent customer experience before and after the product purchase. For this, you should align the strategies of both teams in regular meetings. For example, once per month is perfect for aligning efforts and building a plan for product user training and support. 

On the one hand, the customer enablement team can optimize content production and reuse some of the resources the sales enablement team has created. On the other hand, each customer gets the same level of assistance.

3. Collect customer feedback

The best way to grow the quality of your service and product in any field is by listening to your audience. Thus, asking users what they need or if they are satisfied with a service they get is a must for customer enablement managers. How? It depends on where your audience is: 

• on social media or communities, it can be polls or posts engaging in sharing comments,
• on website, email, or messengers - chatbot or popup.

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Reacting to such feedback makes customers feel valuable. The result is increasing loyalty to your brand.

4. Offer customized upsells

The secret of upsells that sell is personalization, according to the case of each user. Let's say launching an email with a new feature announcement and sending it to your entire email list isn't the best idea. 

Instead, you should identify the needs of each customer based on how they use your product. Then, segment the email list accordingly and write personalized emails suggesting a higher plan with a unique set of features that each of them needs.    

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For instance, you work as a customer enablement manager for a task management platform. Some of your users consistently exceed the limit on users in their plan. Identify the negative results it brings them and mention them in the email with an offer to level up the plan with more team member seats.  

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In such a way, you not only grow revenue but show customers you care about their success with your product. 

5. Turn loyal customers into brand advocates

Existing customers are already loyal to your company. So use this benefit to grow their number. 

Launch a campaign rewarding existing customers for recommending your product because 92% of the audience trusts word-of-mouth marketing.

1. Start with research of the most loyal users.
2. Analyze their customer profiles.
3. Offer incentives that match their interests. 
4. Provide an easy way to share customer experience, such as an opportunity to be the subject of the case study, write a testimonial, or post on social media. 

Conclusion 

Despite the blurred boundaries between customer enablement, support, and sales enablement, more and more companies are creating a dedicated team for this goal. 

Start your customer success enablement strategy with a detailed analysis of your current customers, talk to customer support and the sales team, and sure thing, consider tips from the previous block 😉 

FAQs 

What are the most popular ways to enable customers?

The easiest way is to write knowledge base articles covering each aspect of user experience within a product. On top of that, companies create ready-made templates and record on-demand webinars.

What are the elements of customer enablement?

The customer enablement process includes three basics: company managers who create content, the tools they use for it, and the strategy they follow to implement it. 

What does a customer enablement manager do?

Customer enablement managers are responsible for an outstanding experience for every product or service user. For this, they constantly work on educational materials' production, updating, and tracking if they help to achieve users’ goals.