It's All About The Experience

I just got back from two days at a vendor’s annual partner meeting. I won’t say where, to avoid travel envy, but it was a nice, expensive hotel with lots of blue skies and sunshine, designed to put partners in a positive frame of mind.

What struck me, as I moved around plenary sessions and break-out round tables, were the same themes I always hear from partners. There is a tendency to dwell on the negatives. Partners complain to the vendor about this or that, but it always comes back to the "experience" they have dealing with the vendor. In bChannels we use the phrase "ease of doing business" and it’s a key issue for busy channel partners.

At this point the light bulb went on! I have another project with a large software vendor where we are running a Secret Shopper exercise on partners. We go out and pretend to be a buying customer and score the partner on how they do in the buying journey. Often, they will fall down at some point, such as being uninformed on products or not providing a timely quotation of follow up. This is good, as we, in association with the vendor, can help them address their failings and improve their ‘Customer Experience’ – often abbreviated to ‘CX’.

Why is CX important ? It’s been proven time and again that if you improve the CX, you improve sales. A recent study by Forrester, backed up by our experience, is that partners who address their CX issues see substantial sales improvements . We have evidence in one case of a 30% uptick – just by getting the basics right!

My mind wandered for a bit. A six hour flight delays do that to you! It struck me that in my personal life CX is hugely important. I use Amazon and eBay because the experience is slick, well informed, and friction-less. Why in business should it be any different?

What vendors need to realize is that partners are busy people too! There is an increasing expectation, especially from millennials (as I observe my daughter running her world from her iPhone) that the CX in business should be no different to their personal life.

We are now seeing the emergence of new vendors and partners in our industry, often lumped under the description "born in the cloud." The public's CX expectations are set by their Amazon, Netflix, and eBay experiences. Vendors who don’t react to that trend run the risk of losing current and potential new partners as they become regarded as too difficult to do business with.

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