In many conversations I have with Partners of all sizes, I am often faced with the following question: “We have built our Partners an amazing portal with the best Partner Experience, but they will not visit it, and instead complain that it doesn’t meet their needs! What is an optimal Partner Experience when considering an ecosystem of diverse Partners?”
Let me start by setting the context. Partner Experience is a second cousin to User Experience, where a Provider tries to optimize the experience of a Partner’s users with whom there is some form of interaction or enablement. The idea and objective are usually simple: If the Partner’s users have a better experience, they will be able to understand more, partner more effectively, and the results of the partnership will improve.
So why are some of the Partners (particularly the larger ones like GSIs, RSIs, Distis, and Telcos) rejecting partner portals with a great Partner Experience if it was designed to be good for them? The answer is simple: The common go-to response of all Providers wishing to help optimize a Partner experience has become building a portal. Now if a Partner had one single Provider with one portal and one experience, there would basically be no issue. Unfortunately, ALL Providers have latched on to the same concept, each with their own portal, experience, process, and standards, creating an acute problem for the partner. Is it a surprise then that Partners who need to work simultaneously with many providers are no longer able to manage this plethora of inconsistent portals with different identity Providers, catalogs, data feeds, and processes?
From a Provider perspective, improving the Partner Experience has therefore proven to be trickier and more difficult than providing a better User experience. Unlike User experience, which involves a direct interaction between the user and a company offering the experience (example a Disney or a sports team), the Partner experience involves an intermediary, the Partner company, which sits between the user and the Provider. This added layer may seem trivial, but in reality, it makes a world of difference. The Partner company after all has overarching requirements and constraints that transcend the simplicity of improving a user’s experience through a portal.
For example, a large IT manufacturing organization we work with wanted to improve its Partner Experience and had started by spinning up a Partner portal with a new “look and feel”. The resulting User Experience looked quite good, but global partner feedback on the Partner Experience was mediocre at best. When they enquired why, the main cause came back that the Partners’ users had a new destination to go to. There, they had to register and login to a new system that they needed to learn and navigate. It was disconnected from anything they had seen and anything they used within their own corporate walls, and it had to be added to their plethora of different Provider portals, each jostling for their own optimized Partner Experience. Adding to this was the fact that there were no push catalog updates, identity protection, or data that could be easily passed back to the Partner’s system. Another issue found was the tech Provider’s legal ability to share the user data with their Partner organization, which kept everyone in the dark. The net result was a very low uptake by the Partners’ users even though the IT Provider had invested heavily and acted in good faith trying to solve the Partner Experience problem. Put simply, they built it; but Partners did not want to come. The lesson soon became clear. Repurposing User Experience solutions for a better Partner Experience is bound to fall short of expectations, as the two are fundamentally different.
So, we come to the key question of Providers: What are Partners seeking from Partner Experience that is fundamentally different from an enhanced User Experience? Partners voice the following three common requirements:
First, Partners are trying to boost their own systems, not replace them with those of their Providers. Many of them, particularly the larger ones, have invested millions in enablement infrastructures. What they need is to empower these environments, not have their users circumvented from using them. This means these Partners rather than sending their users anywhere, prefer to pull whatever is needed into their own environment to provide their users the optimal experience right there where they already are. From a provider perspective, this should be seen as an opportunity to have real-time interconnectivity keeping the Partner up to speed in real time.
Second, Partners are trying to keep their users within their own corporate environments, which provides them with identity management and compliance peace of mind. From a Provider perspective, its also a positive because it offloads that responsibility while providing the promise of unequalled scalability. After all, no Provider can ever hope to have more footprint than inside the Partner organization, where users roam securely, are identified, and compliant.
Third, Partners want an optimal Partner Experience to elevate the importance of data sharing which helps both the Provider and Partner to collaborate and make better decisions. Providers who are able to have and share insight with their partners will find that they can work in better tandem launching all kinds of campaigns and enablement workloads.
The three common requests by Partners (among others) may seem simple but pose a dilemma to Providers: How can Providers offer, let alone scale, such a customized Partner experience within the environment of the Partner, which they have zero control over? There are two methods. One is point-to-point integration (API approach) and the other is point-to-network (ecosystem approach). Let’s briefly explain each approach:
A Point-to-Point integrated Partner Experience has the Provider technically connecting their systems directly with the Partner’s backend system through APIs and coded integration. Through the integration of their systems, point-to-point connectivity potentially provides a Partner Experience, but not an optimal one as it comes at a hefty price. It requires ample development resources and time to realize the needed integration and then to maintain it over time. Unfortunately, with Provider programs which typically have many Partners needing to connect, each with different systems, requirements, and constraints, an efficiency ceiling will quickly be reached. And after the initial connectivity deployments, maintenance kicks in, increasing complexity and cost. We have found that Partners who try this approach soon abandon it, because it moves them away from their core business.
But there is another approach that optimizes Partner Experience and interconnectivity without all the technical complexities. It is the Point-to-Network or the Ecosystems Network approach. This approach reasonably assumes that both Providers and Partners will have many other organizations that they wish to connect to. And therefore, it calls for a standardized model (typically referred to as an ecosystems network) that connects a Provider to a network, which then seamlessly and dynamically connects them to any organization they wish. The advantage here is that both the Provider and the Partner connect just once to the network and then it is the network’s job to switch their enablement, identity, processes, workloads, and reporting to any other approved Partner on the network. Each organization in the ecosystem handles its own environment and integration; and there is never any direct technical integration effort between the Provider and the Partner. Connections subsequently take mere minutes, instead of taking months of complex integration work.
In conclusion, Partner Experience has to be treated differently than User Experience. And the future of Partner Experience will not likely be in complex integration projects, but rather with standardized Ecosystem Networks that help Partners reach deep into their respective organizations with minimal technical effort, while operating within an environment that is dynamic, secure, compliant, and scalable.
Ultimately, this paradigm shift provides the answer for achieving an Optimal Partner Experience: It is ecosystem interconnectivity to nonother than each organization’s OWN experience!
