How Technology Partnerships can drive customer delight
Imagine that you are heading into your office on a crisp Monday morning to discuss new strategies for retaining customers. Before you even get to fire up the browser, your team leader informs you that more than half of your customers have left you in favor of a competitor who has been offering stellar experiences by way of powerful technology partnerships.
Is this imaginary scenario already giving you cold sweats even when the midday sun is in full swing?
The fear is real, for sure. Losing customers in a market where companies are doing everything they can to delight customers can mean many things. For starters, it would ring in an inevitable decline in revenue, raise customer acquisition costs with your key performance indicators (KPIs) being thrown out the window.
Customers today have a plethora of options to choose from. Now more than ever, if brands don’t delight their customers, they are at risk of losing them to competitors. According to this PwC report, 59% of customers consider leaving a company after a few bad experiences, while 17% say they are ready to switch after only one bad CX.
I have previously delved into the importance of technology partnerships for SaaS organizations. In this blog, we’ll foray into how technology partnerships can help brands delight and retain customers with a stellar customer experience—while reducing costs per lead and churn.
Technology partnerships help businesses reduce their costs per lead and increase revenue
Thanks to the digital clutter, the average costs per lead have increased in the last few years. To reduce Cost Per Lead (CPL) and win in a market like this, businesses need to strategize co-marketing activities with their technology partners.
One key thing to remember is that with technology partnerships, you should be selling joint solutions and not just pushing products on your customers.
When customers adopt these integrated solutions, it’s a win-win situation for both parties. For customers, technology partnerships offer them the chance of using better and more integrated solutions, leading to delightful customer experiences. For businesses leveraging technology partnerships, it not only leads to a drastic reduction in acquisition costs but also opens up another revenue stream for your organization.
Now let’s look into some of the ways businesses can reduce costs by leveraging co-marketing strategies with technology partners.
Double your leads by sharing your costs and resources
When businesses execute a joint campaign with their technology partners—whose target personas and messaging are similar—there’s a good chance of an overall reduction in cost and effort. Sharing the costs and resources for the campaign can lower your costs per lead as well.
Leverage common target personas and optimize content performance
Owing to the surplus of information around us, marketers often face the massive challenge of trying to drive traffic to their content piece.
Instead of churning out individual pieces of content, businesses can collaborate on go-to-market campaigns with their technology partners to attract, engage, and convert customers and prospects.
To better understand how to optimize content for common target personas, let’s look at an example: Slack + Freshworks integration. Both companies are known for delivering stellar customer experiences.
There are two options here. One is that both businesses can talk separately about their own products. And the second–and better– option is that they can talk about the joint value solution. In the context of Slack + Freshworks, let’s say they chose the first option. Consequently, the content will talk about how Slack is a messaging app for businesses that connects people to the information they need. And also how Freshworks is a company that builds tech that works for everyone, making it easy for IT, customer service, sales, marketers, and HR to do their job and delight their customers.
But the common customers who are looking to buy the integration are not interested in what these two businesses can do separately. They are rather interested in the joint solution offered together. So, the better way for delivering truly impactful content is to talk about a joint value solution. In this case, it is how, by implementing the Freshworks + Slack integration, customer service agents will have access to the technology’s ease of use. And that will enable them to quickly resolve issues, build trust, and earn customers for life.
By selling your solutions instead of your products, technology partnership campaigns perform much better.
Power joint marketing campaigns for new leads
With joint marketing campaigns, businesses can access their partner’s customer base and gain new prospects across geographies. This also works the other way round where your partners can access your customer base to gain new prospects. The time and resources saved on customer databases can prove to lower average costs per lead.
On the other hand, companies can also leverage each other partners’ brand pull to increase their brand visibility and acquire customers in uncharted regions.
Technology partnerships help brands retain customers
Contrary to popular belief, acquiring new customers is not the endgame in the world of SaaS, where ‘churn’ signifies the final blow in the applications battle.
Many businesses often overlook a potentially bigger challenge while trying to attract new customers: the art of keeping and delighting the customers you already have.
According to a study by Bain & Co, a 5% increase in customer retention rates can potentially boost profit up to 95%.
That’s right. High customer churn is a current scourge across industries all around the world, and retaining customers is of paramount importance for the profitability of companies, especially in the world of SaaS. To lower your churn rate, you must adopt proven customer retention strategies. And technology partnerships play an important role in this.
The more integrated your solutions are, the better you are at integrating your customer’s business processes, which leads to a decrease in the churn rate. According to an internal study conducted by Freshworks, we found that the chances of churn are reduced by 50% in customers using more than one app or integrated solution. If customers adopt more than two, their chances of churn can go down by 75%.
Technology partnerships help you build trust and loyalty with customers—two key factors in customer retention.
Technology partnerships: The way ahead
High costs per lead and churn probably constitute the key metrics that can be tied directly to revenue. Reducing churn and improving customer retention among paying customers can not only generate higher revenue and help brands grow, but also guarantee a delightful CX for customers with integrated and intuitive solutions. Bumping up joint co-marketing campaigns with your technology partners can reduce overall acquisition and maintenance costs for everyone involved.
