Presented by Tipalti
Regardless of the size of your business, customers demand a better market experience. In this VB On-Demand event, industry experts share best practices to reduce friction, delight users, and choose the right tech platforms to drive engagement and growth.
Major brands, such as Amazon, Uber and Roblox, have nailed the market comparison. Not only do they provide superior customer experiences for both platform partners and their customers, they do it in such a seamless way that customers expect that level of service in every corner of the internet, both in their B2C and B2B lives. How can a smaller market deliver?
“Right now, the market platforms best positioned for success are those that create an experience for their partners that allows them to think only about their brand and their content, and stay focused on the front of house” , says Paco Suro, GM, global partner payments, at Tipalti.
These digital platforms range from sales platforms to influencer soapboxes, marketplaces for selling music royalties, sharing digital content or serving rideshares. They all create front-facing products and services that are highly specific to their audiences and require unique support to succeed. For example, an e-learning experience, with online educators, is focused not only on building their brand, but also on a classroom and audience of learners, and needs a platform that can support the goals.
So on the back end, the ideal platform provides these educators with efficient ways to build this audience, build a curriculum, provide ways for clients to sign up for courses, and then deliver those courses. And as their momentum builds and demand for services continues to grow, that ultimately needs to be managed by a platform that can grow with them and ensure they deliver superior experiences to their own customers.
A marketplace platform must provide a level of trust, reliability and assurance that any technical challenges that may arise at the back of the house are solved, or at least greatly simplified. And whether it’s a consumer buying goods or services from a platform or a partner producing content for the platform, they need an enriched ecosystem to thrive, providing a solid foundation for growth.
Growing a market in a slow economy
Growing from the start requires a great product, a great platform and a great experience with a lot of involvement. Small businesses need to be unique, agile, and provide the best experience for that ecosystem — and then they need to figure out how to scale. And that is the core of the challenge, says Suro.
How do you maintain that momentum and attract even more partners to your platform, while continuing to serve those you already have on board? And that while engagement and growth on the consumption side continue to grow? It’s about figuring out where to scale, where to put time, effort and resources to keep the tide going.
“Small businesses benefit from eliminating as much waste as possible and trying to integrate best-in-class services that can scale and grow with them, offsetting the need for them to build out their own core discipline in those services says Suro.
The key is simplifying and automating elements that aren’t core to the business, and allocating the right resources and bandwidth to ensure the experience is stable and efficient. And because customer experience is at the heart of all of these experiences, most importantly, you need to eliminate any barrier or latency in the platform experience, whether that’s up front, where customers interact with your partners, or in the backroom, where management requires the platform. a safe and constant service.
The customer experience at the heart
Shopify, the well-known merchant operating platform for selling online, provides the creators and merchants with all the tools they need to set up, sell, and fundraise their stores in just a few hours and fairly seamlessly. And as a platform builds and grows a customer base, part of what it takes to sell is that customer experience, that ease of getting started building a brand and creating an audience, that engagement. creates, money creates and benefits everyone.
“I think people lose sight of that. We are all getting excited about the internet and now web3. That’s all nice, but if you go back to the beginning, you try to create an experience,” says Suro. “It’s not a new way of thinking. As long as you go back to that principle of creating a great customer experience, whoever the customer is, on one side or the other, that’s how these platforms thrive and grow and succeed and continue to gain and expand market share and so on.”
“Ultimately, customer satisfaction depends on a sense of trust and commitment to your ecosystem, a belief in what you offer – especially online, where the unfiltered skeptics live,” he says. “The more you can focus on that and hone that, the more successful you will be.”
To learn more about successfully partnering with creators, offering the kind of platform they come from, and more, don’t miss this VB On-Demand event!
agenda
- Prioritize partner and user experience to increase the status of your brand
- Selecting the right software systems to support growth
- Strategies to retain partners and users to further scale your business
presenters
- Christopher GonzalezHead of Finance, A-Team
- Paco Suro,GM, Global Partner Payments, Tipaltia
- Art ColeModerator, Venture Beat