The Ultimate Customer Enablement Strategy Guide for 2025

Imagine this: You have a powerful inbound and outbound process to bring in quality leads every month. Your amazing sales team converts 90% of these leads into paying customers.

That sounds amazing, right? But here’s the catch: almost all of these customers tend to churn within the first quarter after subscribing to your service. Your retention game —The most important key to bringing in consistent monthly recurring revenue is failing.

Suddenly, the efforts and hard work of your inbound, outbound, and sales team seem nullified. Shocked and confused, you tell yourself – “But, this shouldn’t have happened, I have a self-service help center.”

Here’s the thing: Having a self-service knowledge base is a good start, but there’s more you need to help your customers get the maximum benefit from your product. This is where Customer Enablement steps in.

What is a Customer Enablement Strategy?

Customer enablement is a term that encompasses the activities of customer education, customer success, and customer support.

A customer enablement strategy helps you streamline these processes and makes sure that customers get equipped with the right skills, knowledge, and resources they need to get the maximum value out of your product.

Usually, these three activities are handled by dedicated teams, but customer enablement helps you connect these three teams. This creates an ecosystem where all three teams benefit from each other’s activities.

Why is Having a Robust Customer Enablement Strategy Essential?

1. Helps You Provide The Experience Customers Expect

A well-planned customer enablement strategy transforms from a “nice to have” to a “must have” process when you realize that:

• Customers commonly find the answers to their queries through video tutorials, a knowledge base, and an LMS.

But,

• 76% of software users said that it’s not easy for them to access and find training and help content.

(Source: Whatfix Digital Adoption Trends 2023)

Customers want you to provide them with relevant resources in the way they want to consume and customer enablement is your golden ticket to address these concerns.

2. Increases Product Adoption

By providing comprehensive customer enablement resources, you allow users to dive deep into your product’s advanced features they might otherwise overlook. Users who understand your product better are more likely to integrate it deeply into their daily workflows – increasing your product adoption rate.

This also increases the chances of customers expecting new feature releases and reduces the friction during their release.

3. Reduces Churn

Customer churn is often a case of users feeling overwhelmed or unable to achieve their desired outcomes with your product. A customer enablement strategy is your “Churn police” addressing these pain points proactively, and minimizing the risk of customers churning.

By maintaining a healthy customer base and steadily increasing it, customer enablement also improves your retention rate, and monthly and annual recurring revenue, proving to be a strong pillar that aids your business growth.

4. Builds Stronger Customer Relationships

A customer enablement strategy demonstrates your commitment to customer success, showing that you value their growth and want to help them achieve their business objectives.

This builds your customer relationship as you position yourself as a trusted advisor and not just another service provider. Customers will be more willing to have open conversations providing valuable feedback and suggestions to improve your product.

These customers eventually become your brand advocates and you can even test out new features by giving them early access and improve your product roadmap based on their reactions to your current plan.

Key Elements of an Effective Customer Enablement Strategy

Before we dive into creating the strategy, there are a few prerequisites you’ll need as a foundation to build an effective customer enablement strategy.

1. Your Customer Enablement Team

A customer enablement team does not have a set team structure and would potentially vary from company to company. But, since customer enablement involves three teams who have their specific jobs to fulfill, an effective customer enablement team would look like this:

2. Customer Enablement Tech Stack

When there are three different teams with their dedicated goals, the tech stack needed for customer enablement must be looked into properly before getting them. While the tech stack needed might change from company to company, here are some must-haves:

1. Knowledge Base

A knowledge base is your product's always-open library that hosts various content formats like product documentation, help articles and video tutorials. It's where customers go when they need quick answers, whether it's 3 PM or 3 AM.

Remember the statistic we mentioned earlier about 76% of users struggling to find help content? A well-organized knowledge base is your first line of defense against this challenge.

2. Learning Management System (LMS)

While a knowledge base is like a library, think of an LMS as your product university. It's where structured learning happens. This platform helps you create and deliver comprehensive training programs that take customers from basic to expert users.

An LMS allows you to track users’ progress and overall platform performance, helping you make effective improvements.

3. Video Authoring Tool

A video authoring tool helps you create engaging product tutorials and feature walkthroughs. This tool usually allows you to record your screen, add AI voiceovers, and have editing capabilities that help you create studio-quality content that you can use in your knowledge base, LMS, or as standalone material.

4. In-app Guidance Tool

An in-app guidance tool is the hand that holds your customers as they step into your product. It helps them understand the UI and shows them how to access different features. It can also be implemented when new features are introduced or when there is a UI overhaul.

This reduces the chances of customers feeling lost while using the product and ensures they get the value they were looking for from your product.

5. Customer Success Platform (CSP)

A Customer Success Platform is the magic wand of your customer success team that helps them do the magic of maintaining healthy customer relationships throughout the customer lifecycle.

A CSP helps you spot potential risks, monitor customer behavior, and take proactive decisions that drive customer satisfaction and retention.

6. Product Analytics Tool

If customer success is about helping users achieve their goals, product analytics tools help you understand how they're trying to get there. These tools reveal usage patterns, adoption trends, and potential roadblocks in your product.

This data helps you refine your customer enablement strategy and ensures it addresses real user needs effectively.

7. Customer Support Platform

A customer support platform is where conversations from various channels – email, chat, phone, or social media – come together in one unified space. They also help customer support representatives organize and resolve the support tickets they receive.

On top of this, it can also integrate with a knowledge base (KB) to resolve and redirect common queries to the relevant knowledge base articles. This reduces the workload on the team and helps them focus on more complex tickets.

Building an Effective Customer Enablement Strategy

1. Create Customer Segments

The first step in creating a customer enablement strategy is understanding the customers we will help. Segmentation isn't just about grouping customers – it's about understanding their distinct needs, challenges, and success factors to deliver targeted enablement resources.

Creating Customer Segments:

You can create customer segments based on several criteria. For example, product usage behavior, business and user identity, and user maturity. Let’s see how we can create segments using these categories.

1. Based on product usage behavior

How customer enablement helps:

• Create targeted training paths for each usage level.
• Develop feature-specific tutorials for underutilized features.
• Design automated in-app guides to encourage feature exploration.
• Conducting customer interviews to understand why a specific feature worked or did not work for them.
• Analyze the customer support tickets on features that have low usage.

2. Based on Business Identity

How customer enablement helps:

• The customer success team can understand the types of emails the customers want to send and at what frequency.
• Monitor the product usage keeping the company size, and industry in mind.
• Provide feature tutorials by showing examples of emails for specific industries
• Personalize the onboarding experience based on their industry.

3. Based on customer maturity

2. Set Your Goals And Objectives

Once you’ve understood your customers and segmented them as per your liking, the next step is to determine your goals and objectives.

What is a goal? - It is your long-term outcome you aim to achieve

What is an objective? - It is the short-term outcome that will eventually help you achieve your long-term goal.

Customer enablement as a whole will have major goals to accomplish, while the three teams have their own objectives to complete to accomplish the overarching goal. Let’s see how it might look:

3. Strategize Your Educational Content

Strategizing and building your educational content is the most effective and scalable way to help both your customers and your team. Your content strategy needs to serve three core purposes: educating customers about your product, helping them achieve their goals, and enabling them to solve problems independently. Let's break this down into essential content types and how to approach each one.

A. Foundational Content

Every customer enablement program needs strong foundational content. This includes video tutorials, product documentation, and basic how-to guides. Think of this as your product's essential reading material – it needs to be comprehensive yet accessible. The key is to create content that's easy to navigate and understand, regardless of the customer's expertise level.

For example, the email service provider might start with tutorials on adding marketing contacts, creating customer segments, navigating the email template creation space, and sending out emails.

Pro Tip: Make sure to have resources for a single topic in multiple formats to cater to different learning preferences.

B. Advanced Content

This content category focuses on helping customers extract more value from your product over time. These contents should form a clear learning path that takes customers from novice to expert. Consider creating:

• Advanced feature showcases: Tutorials for using advanced features.
• Advanced use-cases: Tutorials for different types of use-cases
• Best practices: Expert tips and recommended workflows.
• Certification Programs (LMS): Structured learning paths with assessments.

C. Support Content

Support content should focus on problem-solving and troubleshooting. The goal here is to help customers quickly resolve issues and continue using your product. Contents include:

• Troubleshooting guides
• FAQs and common issues
• Technical documentation
• Setup and Configuration Guides
• Integration Instructions

Pro Tip: Similar to foundational content, it’s best to have these contents in multiple formats.

D. Interactive Learning Content

While self-paced content forms the backbone of customer enablement, interactive learning adds a crucial human element that accelerates understanding and drives engagement.

Through real-time interactions, customers can get immediate answers, share experiences with peers, and learn from expert insights in ways that static content cannot provide. Webinars and Virtual Instructor-led Training are examples of interactive learning.

1. Webinars:

Webinars are live sessions for a large audience, typically combining presentation, demonstration, and Q&A segments. It allows you to reach many customers while maintaining an interactive learning environment. Common webinar events include:

Product deep dives: Exploration of complex features

Industry-specific sessions: Showcasing use cases for different industries

Q&As: Direct interaction with customers

Best Practices: Sessions for optimal product usage

2. Virtual Instructor-led Training (VILT):

VILT is similar to webinars but is led by product experts who guide the learners through a structured learning objective, helping them use your product more effectively. VILT offers a more intense interactive session and personalized attention to the audience.

VILTs can follow events similar to webinars but can focus them on particular customer segments, or based on customer journey.

Pro Tip: Use common questions from webinars and VILT sessions to enhance your self-service content.

Check out our Podcast with Dan Braithwaite (Sr. director of product training) to learn more about VILTs.

4. Design Your Customer Enablement Journey

Creating content is only half the battle – delivering it effectively throughout the customer lifecycle is equally crucial. A customer enablement journey maps out how and when customers receive different types of content and support, ensuring they get the right help at the right time.

To design the customer enablement journey, take the journey a customer goes through right from being a prospect to becoming your product advocate. A product adoption journey can express this well, it goes like this:

• Awareness stage
• Interest stage
• Evaluation stage
• Trial stage
• Activation stage
• Adoption stage

Let’s develop the customer enablement journey around these stages:

How to Deliver The Content?

An effective delivery strategy combines both automated and human interaction. Let's explore how to balance these mechanisms.

A. Automated Interactions:

Automated interactions can be followed using two approaches: Workflow-based and trigger-based touchpoints.

1. Workflow-based touchpoints:

Workflow-based automation is usually used in sync with a customer’s journey with you after purchase. Starting with a welcome email, then followed by a series of engagement-nudge emails over their first few weeks.

It typically includes regular feature education through product tip emails, best practice newsletters, and feature announcements.

Workflow-based automation ensures that customers receive timely course recommendations and other educational content aligned with their roles and progress.

2. Trigger-based touchpoints:

While workflow automation follows a preset path, trigger-based automation responds dynamically to customer behavior. It's like having an invisible assistant who notices changes in patterns and responds accordingly.

For example, when a customer's product usage drops, it triggers re-engagement email sequences. When they hit milestones, it celebrates their success and suggests next steps.

B. Human Interactions:

While automation handles the day-to-day engagement, human interactions are needed to check in with your customers and be there when they need help from you.

Conduct monthly satisfaction interviews and quarterly product alignment interviews to ensure customers are satisfied and cater to their needs better.

While automation sends re-engagement email sequences when a customer has a low product usage pattern, human interactions are needed if those emails are not helping. It helps you to understand the problem better and come up with a personalized solution.

Finding the right balance

It is common practice for companies to provide dedicated customer success support for higher-tier plan customers, while resorting to only automated support for lower-tier plan customers.

Remember, the goal isn't to choose between automation and human interaction but to leverage both in ways that create the most value for your customers while scaling efficiently.

A good customer enablement process throughout a customer’s journey should help you achieve this. Usually, a lower-tier pricing customer would have fewer features to learn, so a well-planned in-app product tour and “get started” tutorials should suffice.

Meanwhile, enterprise plan customers might have a lot to set up before they even get started using a whole lot of features. Here, a personal onboarding might be required. But with this system, even if lower-tier plan customers request for a personal onboarding, CSMs would be available.

5. Establish Success Metrics

Once you’ve implemented your strategy, monitoring its process and measuring its performance should go hand in hand. To measure performance, let's look at two key areas:

• How well your enablement activities are performing.
• How they impact customers’ success.

A. Tracking Enablement Activities

Tracking customer enablement activities mostly involves measuring the performance of your different platforms and resources.

Key Knowledge Base Metrics to Track:

1. Knowledge base visits: Tracks how frequently customers seek self-service help, indicating the visibility and accessibility of your knowledge base.

How to track: Available inside your knowledge base software

2. Search bar effectiveness: Measures how successful customers are in finding relevant content through searches.

How to track: Available inside your knowledge base software.

Key Learning Management System Metrics to Track:

1. Number of learner enrollments: It shows how effectively you drive customers to your training programs.

How to track: Available inside your LMS tool

2. Course completion rate: It tells how many learners have completed a particular course indicating its effectiveness and engagement.

How to track: Available inside your LMS tool

Key Customer Success Platform Metrics to Track:

1. Customer Health Score: Provides a holistic view of customer engagement with your product and enablement resources.

How to track:

Step 1: Decide on the metrics that you want to consider. For example, product usage rate, customer satisfaction score (CSAT), NPS, and no. of support ticket entries.

Step 2: Since these metrics have different measuring values, assign a health score to a range of metric scores. For example, customers who voted in the range of “2” to “4” in the CSAT get a 5 health score.

Step 3: Divide the total no. of health scores with the number of metrics used. That is your customer health score.

2. Milestone Achievement Rate: It helps you track how effectively customers progress through their enablement journey.

How to track:

No. of customers who reached the milestone on time / No. of customers in the milestone journey

Pro Tip: Track the milestone progress of different customer segments to understand how each of them interacts with your product and resources.

Key Customer Support Platform Metrics to Track:

1. Support Ticket Volume: It tells you the number of support tickets your representatives handle. It helps you track your self-service effectiveness over time.

How to track: Available on your customer support platform

2. First-contact Resolution Rate: It indicates how your enablement resources increase customers’ knowledge of your product.

How to track:

( No. of tickets solved on the first interaction / total no. of tickets ) X 100

Tracking Customers’ Success

While enablement activity metrics show how customers engage with your product and resources, customer success metrics reveal the actual impact of your enablement efforts on customers.

1. Time-to-value: Measures how quickly customers achieve their first meaningful outcome with your product.

How to track:

Measure the number of days it took the customer to achieve the outcome since onboarding.

Pro Tip: Different customer segments might have different “first meaningful outcome”. So, take those into account when measuring time-to-value.

2. Product Adoption Rate: It tells you how many customers have started to use your product in their everyday workflow.

How to track: ( New Active Users / Total Signups ) X 100

3. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): It indicates customer happiness with your product and enablement initiatives.

How to track:

Step 1: Survey your customers and ask them to rate their experience with your product on a scale of 1-5.

Step 2: Note down the number of people who’ve voted for “4 or 5”. These are your Satisfied Respondents

Step 3: Use this formula to get your CSAT -

(No. of Satisfied Respondents / Total No. of Respondents) X 100

4. Net Promoter Score (NPS): It measures the likelihood of customers recommending your product to their peers.

How to track:

Step 1: Similar to CSAT, send a survey asking customers if they’ll recommend your product to a friend on a scale from 1-10

Step 2: Analyze the results

People who voted:

0 to 6 (Detractors) - are not likely to recommend your product

7 or 8 (Passives) - are satisfied but might not be actively recommending your product

9 or 10 (Promoters) - are loyal and more likely to recommend your product.

Step 3: Use this formula to find out NPS -

( Percentage of Promoters - Percentage of Detractors )

A Quick Recap

• Create Customer Segments - Understand your customers through usage patterns, business characteristics, and maturity levels to deliver targeted enablement.
  
• Define Goals and Objectives - Set clear goals like increasing time-to-value and product adoption, then break them down into actionable team objectives.
  
• Strategize Your Content - Build a content ecosystem with foundational resources, advanced materials, and interactive learning experiences through webinars and VILT.
  
• Design Your Enablement Journey - Map out how and when customers receive different types of content, balancing automated and human touchpoints throughout their lifecycle.
  
• Establish Success Metrics - Track both enablement activities and customer success metrics to measure effectiveness and continuously improve your strategy.

Trainn - Your All-in-One Customer Enablement Platform

Trainn brings together all the essential enablement tools you need in one unified platform. With Trainn’s no-code tool, you can:

1. Create engaging product training videos, comprehensive interactive product documentation, and detailed help articles without depending on your design team.
   
2. Build and maintain a Knowledge Base that provides 24/7 self-service support.
   
3. Deliver structured learning through a branded LMS Academy complete with custom courses, quizzes, and certifications.
   
4. Make data-driven decisions using learner-level analytics that show exactly how customers engage with your LMS.

Try out Trainn with our 14-day free trial with all features unlocked. No credit card is needed.