How the Right Partnerships Boost Customer Retention: "... Strategic partnerships ... allow companies to close gaps in their product or service offerings, provide more features to customers, create customer stickiness, and solve client problems in a holistic way.".

• Author: Chirimar, Sourabh
• Position: BUSINESS & FINANCE

BUSINESSES constantly are under pressure to identify and convert quality leads into paying customers. Yet, most experienced business leaders know there is something better than landing a new customer: keeping an existing one. Customer retention is no easy task. It means continually meeting customer expectations by solving known and new problems, innovating and improving products and services, enhancing experiences, and offering additional benefits and promotions.

The responsibility for customer retention, however, does not only fall in the hands of a company's internal departments. Strategic business partnerships create new avenues that facilitate higher customer retention while keeping internal teams and resources from going on overload. Go-to-market business partnerships have inherent value, but they are not the only kind of partnerships growing companies are using today. Technology partnerships are on the rise. They help businesses find innovative and efficient solutions to operational challenges. They also address target market pain points, allowing businesses to meet customer expectations, achieve go-to-market goals, and prepare for the future.

Customer needs have become increasingly complex and sophisticated as business processes and daily tasks integrate further with innovative technology. They expect competent, committed, and consistent solutions from business partnerships, in everything from protecting company data, establishing seamless operations, reducing market risk, and achieving organizational growth. The more complex the business environment becomes, the more such partnerships make sense, with efficient processes and improved customer experience a paramount priority. Organizations that take the step to integrate partnership solutions into their customer retention strategy will find new opportunities for business growth and increased revenue at their fingertips.

By now, most companies realize they cannot solve all of their customers' problems. Even the Googles and the Microsofts of the world understand that companies need to partner to create nimble ecosystems. Consider that Google presently maintains more than 3,000 partnerships, the vast majority of which are technology partners, even with their own 150,000 employees dedicated to customer solutions. This interconnected ecosystem of strategic relationships enables both big and small businesses to focus on internal infrastructure and improved customer experience. It is all about gaining economies of scale where partners come in to build innovative solutions that increase the level of production and customer retention while keeping costs low.

Strategic partnerships allow two companies to come...