What is Product Enablement, Its Actual Need and How It Works in Large Organizations

In layman’s terms, Product Enablement is basically making the employees of any organization, department, company or entity more knowledgeable about a certain product, software or tool. This helps employees to use the product more efficiently, understand its USP, mechanism, functionalities, features and how to get the most out of it. This is required in large organizations and companies, where every other day new software products are launched. Therefore, it is enabling the employees to learn the dynamics of the newly launched products, and use them effectively in their operational domain for increasing productivity. In this way, the employees are more aware, trained and feel comfortable using a new product or software for enhancing their skills, knowledge and productivity in the workplace. It works parallel with customer enablement and sales enablement, as these two are also drivers of business growth.

The Need for Product Enablement

It is basically needed to empower the workers or employees of any large company to sharpen their abilities, while using a new software, tool or physical product. This eventually helps in improving quality of service, productivity, helps in retaining employees in an organization, minimizing attrition rates and improving upon timeline. The crux of the matter is to enhance a department’s overall effectiveness. And, it is experts and technology partners like “Guidde” that provides the best of sales, customer, client & product enablement software to all companies that are growing, and want to make their employees and end-users become adequately knowledgeable on using a certain product, software, tool or service. Through product enablement, you can train your employees across the board. It is all about the requisite knowledge to use workplace software in an efficient way. It also helps in boosting the existing skill-level of employees or a department as a whole. It can be the backend accounts department or the main production line. The bottomline is to teach employees how to use the latest software products more efficiently, and to its fullest potential. This is mainly required in large organizations, where the management needs to train its new joiners for getting them accustomed or acclimatize to the latest software products & tools.

Key Features of Product Enablement Process

A product enablement program or software basically teaches an employee to dive deep into the overall structure and functionality of a company’s product that is newly launched. It is only when the employees start looking at and understanding a particular product from a user’s perspective, it is considered a successful enablement or learning program. With one such product and sales enablement, the employees can better collaborate with other inter-departmental teams, in order to:

• Carry out improvements, modifications & upgrades to the product through development
• Utilize the product or software to execute tasks more efficiently
• Take the maximum advantage of all product functionalities & features
• Make use of the product’ functionalities in a creative way
• Help end-users troubleshoot problems with the product

The basic responsibilities of one such enablement program is to design, develop, create and run a series of department-centric employee or worker training modules. It is basically needed for working with the product team to develop educational resources, specific to a department.  It also helps in streamlining the product learning process.

Difference between Product & Customer Enablement

Though product and customer enablement are similar processes, they serve different purposes. The first works in a way to improve an employee’s acquaintance with a newly launched software product, whereas customer or client enablement focuses on improving user experience. Here, the educational materials too are different. One is evidence-based assumption of a customer’s experience, whereas the other is about making a product, easy to use and understand for the employee of any department or organization. In a customer enablement process, the end-user of a product or service is provided with all the tools, resources and guidelines needed to use a software product more efficiently. The resources can be in the form of Live tutorials, written manuals, videos, audio guides & explanations, interactive tutorials and a full content library. Whereas, product enablement is specifically aimed at employees. Similarly, sales enablement is another side of client enablement, which helps in educating, training, empowering and strengthening the marketing department of any company.

The Immediate Beneficiaries

In a customer enablement program, it is the clients and end-users that benefit directly from one such training module. But, in case of product enablement, the immediate beneficiary is any department, team or employees that are working within a company, across different product and service domains. But, there are certain enablement programs and systems that are tailored for a specific category of employees, like the marketing teams, accounts team or operations team.

The Process of Product Enablement

It is a thoroughly organized procedure to effectively train the users of any product, especially the employees of an organization or company that uses such new software products for increasing productivity and streamlining processes. And, with technology experts like “Guidde” by your side, they offer the most engaging platforms that help facilitate any employee, customer or sales enablement program. It is through one such expert, the enablement content would be user-interface rich, organized, consolidated, searchable and in multi-format mode.

Increased ROI

With one such enablement program or software, your company or department can definitely expect an increased Return-On-Investment (ROI). This is because your employees feel more acquainted and familiar with a new software product, which they can use easily. It is basically to provide the right kind of training to a team in a department with a newly launched software or tool, so that they can use it efficiently for increasing their overall workplace productivity. In this way, generate more sales and revenue for the company, with minimum time wastage. It is basically to make employees in an organization ‘used to’ and familiar with software that helps enhance overall efficiency and productivity at the workplace.

Final Words

Today, a majority of companies are using one such enablement program to train, educate and enhance the skill-level of employees, so that they are in a better position to use a product. It is all about how employees engage with a newly launched software or tool. So, organizations are developing a future roadmap for achieving their enablement goals, by helping employees get all the information required to use a product and increase their overall efficiency.