Why Product Enablement And Customer Enablement Must Cross Paths

Is customer onboarding a continuous process? Do you need to personalize it? Realistically, after your organization launches a product or completes the project it’s working on, the focus shifts to a new product or project.

To execute a new project, your team needs additional skills; the process of onboarding starts all over again. When your organization completes a project or product, the obvious thing is to push the product into the market for consumers.

Product Enablement translates feature to value; this enables consumers to understand how your products and solutions can help them solve their problems. Product enablement also guarantees that your solutions deliver value throughout the customer journey.

How much information does a team member have about the new product or project? This continuous onboarding is what makes product enablement and customer enablement necessary.

What Is Product Enablement?

A holistic digital transformation covers a wide area of an organization’s methods and processes; one area that is, however, outstanding is the organizational culture. If your company’s organizational culture is not flexible, you may encounter resistance from your employees, if you attempt to transform certain aspects of your processes digitally.

For instance, if you want to change to a product-led culture, you must have a product enablement strategy; what it means is that you must have a process associated with training the rest of your company about your product; you must raise internal awareness about your product.

Product enablement is a procedure you use specifically to provide relevant product knowledge to the different departments in your organization. It’s an automated system that enhances employees to deal with product-related issues in their departments in real-time.

Before now, the focus has always been on the sales department only having all relevant information about products to enable them to sell products. However, customers have become tech-savvier, and embarking only on sales enablement will not suffice.

The fundamental difference between product and sales enablement is that any employee can undergo the process. Product enablement must not be the same for every employee, any information an employee has must be specific to the department.

Ensuring that every department has the relevant information is the duty of the product enablement team. For instance, a sales team must know everything a customer stands to benefit from the product.

On the other hand, the customer support team must be ready to address issues or queries that may arise after the customer purchases the product; for this reason, the customer support team must know the vital details about the workings of the product.

What Is Customer Enablement?

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Customer enablement refers to collaborative processes and strategies you can leverage to enhance an improved customer experience. It enables the provision of tools, training, and resources consumers require for using your products or services effectively.

Most often, SaaS and B2B organizations that run the subscription models require customer enablement. On the other hand, many B2C products don’t need education and follow-up information.

If you are into B2B products, adding value to items your customers purchase through demos, onboarding, and community forums determines the quality of customer enablement. The success of customer enablement projects depends on your collaborative measures with customer service.

It’s a win-win situation; the customer enjoys a better purchasing experience and brands gain brand ambassadors when agents equip users with the materials they need to achieve their goals, and buyers provide companies with feedback. Customer enablement can be likened to a flip of product enablement.

Instead of focusing on the assets employees need for onboarding for new products, customer enablement concentrates on customer needs. The aim is to help consumers get the best value out of your product or service.

For both product and customer enablement, the overriding factor is communication. You leverage educational resources and training to pass on the relevant information that will improve employees’ productivity and customer experience for consumers.

Why Is Product Enablement Important For Productivity?

Imagine having a product support group responsible for responding to your clients but lacking deep knowledge of your product; the clients channel their questions to the product manager. The number of clients you have translates to the number of questions you get; answering these questions distracts the product manager from focusing on the real business of building the next set of features?

If the relevant information about your product is available to the different teams in your organization, you can concentrate better on your core functions and increase employees’ performance. The result is that you can have time to build a more competitive product.

However, it’s not enough to just make artifacts and allow customers internal access to available products; the products must be available at the right time and context.

The current top ways for both product and customer enablement include:

• In-App Guidance - The in-app guidance allows employees to learn while producing; even if you are using the platform in question for the first time, you can still be producing viable work. It saves valuable time and is a way to make learning relevant.
• Video Hosting - Video hosting tools allow for the passing on of knowledge in visual form, both as the main form of information or as a supplement embedded within a website or app.
• Webinar Streaming - webinars are live and can be interacted with by participants to provide specifics rather than the general overview that video lectures aim for.
• Knowledge Bases - A knowledge base, or knowledge bank, is the starting point for customer training.
• Customer Success Management - These are tools that enable you to keep records of how your customers use your products or services, understand their pain points and adjust your approach accordingly.

Conclusion

According to a study by Statista in 2021, 62.8% of organizations in Australia believed that product enablement will reshape and improve their customer experience (CX) by 2022. Along the same line, when organizations enable customers with different tools, they enhance real-time feedback that will improve productivity and ultimately, ROI.