The revelation that as of 2021, 20% of startups failed in the first year, 50% within five years, and 65% within ten years is quite disheartening. Many reasons such as startup costs like licenses and permits and fixed, or variable monthly expenses may be responsible for this high rate of failures, but one significant reason will be the stiff competition in the global market.
The success of any business hinges on the number of customers it has; customer acquisition and retention are, therefore, vital to the survival of any startup. The fact that a lot of business transactions are now online has heightened the rate of competition; when your startup acquires customers, it becomes necessary that you must strive to retain them.
Customer retention lies in how your product or service satisfies a customer. Product onboarding has changed significantly; it’s no longer business “as usual,” especially with your online customers.
Your startup will do better with a customer enablement platform, as the focus now is a zero-touch self-service relationship.
What is a customer enablement platform?
A customer enablement platform is an organization that specializes in harnessing the processes and strategies your startup needs to improve customer experience. A customer enablement platform will package the tools, training, and resources your customers need at every moment to successfully use your product or service into information.
The tools, training, and resources that may be packaged into a video will enable them to use your software successfully and turn your startup into a zero-touch, self-service organization. With a customer enablement platform, your startup cuts out the tedious task customer service, sales, and marketing teams do during product onboarding.
Your customer enablement platform ensures that the teams concentrate on more meaningful tasks that will ultimately improve both customer experience and ROI.
The workings of a customer enablement platform
A customer enablement platform combines the multiple categories of tools your startup will need in different departments to deliver software enablement that performs the following six unified, important tasks:
- Content creation
Organizations usually share information in two primary formats: a short form that comes as 2-3 minute long browser recordings and the long form which is one hour-long Zoom recording, demos, or webinars. Your customer enablement platform will enable your startup to record brilliant short-form videos and ingest and enrich long-form recordings, that will deliver a single source of knowledge for your startup.
The technical staff should be able to create new “real” content without waiting for marketing content.
- Organize information
Your customer will derive more satisfaction if your startup can organize the different information you have about your product scattered over multiple platforms such as YouTube, Google Drive, and Zoom Cloud Recordings through LMS solutions. The organization of these videos makes this information more accessible.
A customer enablement platform can use Smart Video Platform technology to organize the information. This Smart Video Platform technology can classify and provide answers for each video in the system, such as which application and location inside the app, and what topic is discussed in the video as distilled from the transcript automatically generated by the platform?
Outsourcing this task to a customer enablement platform saves your startup the funds needed to acquire the technology.
- Multiple means to publish and share video content
Customers need your startup to deliver information at the point of need and in the proper context; ways your startup can leverage a customer enablement platform to publish and share video content include:
- In-context videos – delivering videos in-context while customers make use of the underlying software product.
- Browser extension – to enable the delivery of knowledge across any software tool in your tech stack that teams will use daily – for instance, Salesforce or Outreach when you have to engage a customer or Zendesk to respond to a ticket.
- Web app – Web – delivering knowledge from the web application as a single video, playlist of multiple videos, or via a shared video portal accessible by a specific customer.
- Discover
It may be difficult for your startup to immediately have a contextual library, that will provide content recommendations based on application location, as well as the ability to search using natural language. However, this comes along with what your customer enablement platform will provide.
An example of what you may get from the platform can be videos of customers sharing their experiences using specific features of your product for unique workflows and adding context around each solution.
- Maximal know-how at minimal effort for viewers
Customers have options they can resort to; any startup that is not focused on excelling will fail. The design of your video player should be to provide maximal know-how at minimal effort; it should assist the viewer to assimilate the relevant information and perform it directly on the software.
When customers view your video, they should jump directly to the relevant application and perform the same workflow.
- Analyze
Will your startup provide customers with advanced tracking and analytics? How are you planning to enhance real-time events with engagement metrics and insights on the key trends?
You need a customer enablement platform that can integrate into your startup’s tech stacks when sending emails through platforms like Gmail, Outlook, Salesforce, Outreach, and Hubspot.
You will need Slack to effectively communicate with customers and Zendesk to resolve support tickets. To score leads and content in the CRM, Salesforce or Hubspot will come in handy.
Conclusion
Ensuring that your startup does not fall into the group that folds up within a year depends on how you plan for success; many factors can make your startup fail; however, having a solid client base is a sure step to relevance in the market.
A customer enablement platform takes a lot of the burden off the shoulders of your customer service, sales, and marketing teams.
Also Read: 10 Ways to Grow Businesses By Integrating AI
