Editorial
The Gist
- Partner selection matters. Choose partners that align with your technology and innovation strategies to ensure seamless CX integration.
- Customer insights guide decisions. Use customer feedback and ideal customer profiles to build partnerships that resonate with your audience.
- Invest for long-term success. Be prepared to invest time and resources in partnerships that may require heavy lifting now but pay off later.
When you think about exceptional customer experiences today, you probably think multi-channel, integrated, and always evolving. You think about brands like Nordstrom or Chewy.com that personalize as much as possible and transcend the barriers of online and in-person.
Now, think about the back-end. It's highly unusual that enterprises today would use the same tools for commerce, product catalog, digital asset management and so on. They wouldn’t have the expertise and resources to build them on their own.
Customer experience built in a vacuum is like playing a symphony with just one instrument — it lacks variety, depth and harmony. To deliver a superior customer experience, you need great partners. But picking the right partners requires a strategic approach to ensure they complement your offerings while enhancing the overall experience.
Here are some guiding thoughts that have helped my company develop a robust partner network over the past decade:
Take Cues from Your Customers
Who are the vendors your customers already trust? Partnering with those companies can help create a more high-value, cohesive experience.
Analyze feedback, support interactions and customer forums to see if they gravitate towards particular solutions. Figure out why they prefer these solutions and use it to meet and exceed their expectations.
We heard commercetools come up frequently with retail and ecommerce companies. That provided the nudge we needed to explore a partnership. Today, that partnership for customer experience still pays dividends.
As you grow, you may find you’re able to provide the cues. With your expertise and domain knowledge, you can steer customers towards the best tools for translations, search and more to meet their needs. That’s also part of an excellent experience.
Taking cues from your customers means you’ll build something relevant to what they need. It also demonstrates that you’re always listening, learning and acting on their feedback. That builds trust — and there’s no substitute for trust in a competitive market.
Related Article: 3 Must-Follow Rules for Customer Feedback Before Launch
Compare Your Ideal Customer Profiles
An ideal customer profile (ICP) catalogs shared characteristics among your customers, such as industry, size, location, revenue and pain points.
When evaluating potential partners, determine if your ICPs align. Matching the two ensures both you and your partner are equipped to address similar customer needs and challenges, making your experience more seamless and consistent.
Consider the Uber and Spotify partnership, which allows Uber customers to control the music played during their rides through their Spotify accounts. Both brands target tech-savvy, urban millennials who value convenience and personalization. With that lens, it only makes sense to enhance their experiences and drive mutual growth through a partnership.
However, matching ICPs shouldn’t be an absolute. Sometimes you should purposefully explore partnerships that extend your ICP. If you're looking to expand into a new region or target a different audience, partner with companies that have a strong advantage in those areas.
Consider Technology and Innovation Strategies
In a McKinsey study, business development professionals were asked about the contributing factors of a partnership's success. One of the top two answers was a goal alignment for the partnering companies (called parent companies in the study). We require any partner to align on two objectives: technology and innovation.
Let’s start with technology. Avoid wasting time and resources with companies that don’t share similar capabilities or a future roadmap. If a potential partner’s system is not, at minimum, compatible with yours, that’s a red flag. It only leads to inefficiencies and missed growth opportunities. For us, that means automatically cutting companies that lack open architecture or the necessary APIs for seamless integration.
Partners should also share similar innovation philosophies. There’s nothing worse than getting excited about a new partnership and then discovering their offering hasn’t evolved over the past few years.
We believe when the market changes, so do what our customers need. To that end, we explore new ideas by participating in one (or more) annual hackathons. There’s also a minimum amount of learning and development hours our employees must meet every year.
We don’t need a laundry list detailing a potential partner’s innovation philosophies and how they see them through, but we do need to know that they’re taking steps to grow and evolve. Because if they’re not, our customer experience will miss the mark down the road.
Prepare for Heavy Lifting With Partner Ecosystems
The stage of your company’s development will likely factor into partnership conversations.
For a younger company, it's hard to get the buy-in required from an already-established organization. But there also might be cases that partnering with larger, strategic independent software vendors (ISVs) like Salesforce or SAP is necessary, like if your customers require those integrations. As you grow, it makes more sense for these larger organizations to partner with your company.
In the meantime, the onus of work is on the smaller company to invest time and resources to establish the partnership and develop integrations. While these relationships can provide value to your customers, you may need to contribute more than you initially receive. Being patient and willing to invest is the only sure response that will pay off in the future.
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A thoughtfully-crafted partner network not only enhances your customer experience, but strengthens trust and position in the market. As you develop your network, remember the goal is to create a cohesive one that paves the way for long-term customer satisfaction.
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