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A good Partner Experience leads to a good Customer Experience.
Background to the Partner Experience?
Successful organizations in any industry know about customer experience (CX), employee experience (EX) and digital experience (DX).
In an increasingly globalized world, delivering a seamless and efficient experience to your channel partners is an important differentiator. It has gradually evolved into the so-called partner experience. Do you know what this term implies?
Companies selling through distribution channels understand that developing programs, processes and systems for distributors does not guarantee success.
With multiple vendors competing for distributors’ attention, those that lack a defined engagement strategy run the risk of losing partners’ attention and compromising their satisfaction.
Was the channel always so important, and was it always so easy to lose?
What is the Partner Experience?
Let’s examine what experience is and why it’s important in today’s business environment; we’ll also look at how to develop a partner experience program.
According to Imagineer in their post, the Partner Experience is the sum of all interactions a business has with a provider of goods or services.
Partner Experience is a measure of a company’s ability to create, develop and expand long-term relationships with partners and channels.
According to this consultancy, experience Design drives the engagement of:
- Suppliers.
- Distributors.
- Business partners.
Designing a Partner Experience Program.
A well-designed program helps to:
- Understand the health of your partners.
- Enable partner centricity within your organization.
- Accelerate pipeline opportunities for all parties involved.
In this case, the customer’s experience with the product is highly dependent on their experience with the partner involved in the process, which in turn is highly dependent on the partner’s experience with the organization.
Steps to create a program.
The Partner Experience offers the opportunity to influence process and culture change within your organization. To create it, we propose a series of steps:
Plan.
A key component of creating this plan is to map out a partner experience, which can then be used as a guide and anchor throughout your planning process.
Ask yourself the following questions for absolute clarity:
- Why do we want to establish a member experience program?
- Who are the participants in this program on the partner and organizational sides?
- What are the aspects of the member experience program that you would like feedback on?
- At what point in the member’s journey do we want to gather feedback? Is there a key point of contact to look at?
Design.
When designing the member experience program, start with the results of the planning phase to begin to identify the key factors and drivers that influence the member journey.
Implement and optimize.
As with any solid implementation, lean toward taking an iterative approach that allows you adequate time and resources for quality testing prior to launch. This is where you can see real feedback start to come in from your partner ecosystem, and your sales and alliance team members read, respond to and analyze that feedback.
The health of partner relationships are key to the health of the company and the evolution of your key metrics.
Allswers software offers a free demo to set up an experience program and leverage all the resources in a successful way in your company. Do not hesitate to contact us for more information.
