Technology buyers have shifted out of the IT department into the heads of business departments. This has meant a shift in how the IT channel sells technology, and at SYNNEX Comstor, this has meant that a customer experience approach is front and center of every deal. Understanding business outcomes and mapping technology solutions to meet the needs of customers today and into the future is critical to building stronger, more sustainable relationships. At the core of this CX approach is learning how to develop a Customer Success Plan.
“A Customer Success Plan is the core to any customer experience journey,” Carl Paul, Partner Success Executive at SYNNEX Comstor, told us. “It is the document that sets the metrics and the business outcomes that the partner is trying to achieve with the customer.”
Understanding the customer experience journey is critical for any reseller partner, but not every partner comprehends the value. If a VAR sees themselves as an order taker, their company spends nearly five times as much securing new customer relationships, rather than continuing to sell to their existing customer base. Retaining five percent of customers can increase a company’s profitability by seventy-five percent. That is a significant payoff for embracing a customer experience approach.
To help partners embrace this approach and achieve this type of success, SYNNEX Comstor is offering VARs several different types of customer experience training. SYNNEX Comstor offers one-on-one practice building to help partners establish the foundation on which to build their Customer Experience practice, Customer Experience sales training, Customer Success Plan building, and others. On February 18, partners can sign up for a half-day, interactive course that walks them through creating a Customer Success Plan. If you can’t make the February 18 class, you can register for the April 15 class.
“Developing the plan is often where we see partners get hung up,” Carl told us. He will be the instructor for this course and believes in creating an engaging and interactive curriculum. “We are asking technical, IT-minded people, to think beyond the technology to the business outcomes that an organization is trying to accomplish.”
Not only will partners learn to identify business outcomes and key performance indicators, but they will develop an adoption plan that they can execute on after the class. “It is important for these partners to have a plan in place and then measure performance to see if the customer is attaining the metrics that were originally set up.” Carl noted that staying connected to the customer to monitor progress is a way to identify if the current technology solution is meeting their need or if they may need more training or to upgrade or add in a new layered solution. It is also how to proactively secure renewals.
One example of this is considering the number of organizations that sought to create a remote workforce quickly during a pandemic when travel and in-person meetings were no longer a possibility. By understanding what the company is trying to accomplish, it becomes easier to map solutions such as flexible, secure, infrastructure for remote desktops or Webex for video collaboration and web meetings. As the hybrid-workforce continues into 2021, it is important to stay connected and determine if additional security requirements are needed, or more personalized Webex desktop solutions are needed for homes and offices.
This focus on customer experience is significant to SYNNEX Comstor as well as Cisco. In fact, Cisco Gold Partners will need to earn their customer experience badge by next year. The training provided by SYNNEX Comstor will help their partners achieve this goal.
To learn more and register for the Customer Success Plan course and others in the series, click here.
