It's quite a bold statement to say that providing someone elses services could actually help you retain your own customer base. However, that's what one of our larger partners said to me today when I was visiting them. We were going through some statistics and came on to the subject of retentions. Quite an important matter under the current environmental circumstances.
From the figures we discussed he had worked out that of their standard 10% churn rate, where customers had bought a hosted service bundled with their own solution the churn rate was as low as 2%! Obviously if you only have about £1000 worth of services then this doesn't add up to much (£80 in fact :) ). However, they aren't, as you'd imagine. So the retention of those customers was actually saving them a considerable amount of money.
Not bad then, retaining existing customers and being part of our partner scheme they were also enjoying quite a healthy chunk of revenue from the commission earnt also. Nice!
We've always known that customers that have hosted services are more 'sticky' but it's not often we find people that take the time to actually measure the comparisons between customers they've lost off their own services, compared to customers that have their service + a hosted solution.
As Kryten from Red Dwarf would say 'Engage smug grin mode'.
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