A few years ago, the largest customer of one of my clients challenged them to deliver more value than just the annual premium adjustment and adequate claims handling. The challenge was not without consequences. Competitors were eager to arrange insurance coverage at lower rates. And the client was anticipating substantial premium savings by increasing the deductible. By temporarily strengthening her organization, my client retained her biggest customer and positioned as a strategic partner.

In retrospect, this story is a success. It didn't look like it would be a success when the customer posed his challenge for the first time. Despite years of cooperation, neither party succeeded in elevating the collaboration to a strategic partnership. The challenge meant an opportunity for profound change.

Building a strategic partnership

My client is a medium-sized captive insurer specialized in public-sector insurance and risk management. They have built up knowledge, expertise, experience, and networks from this specialty to serve their customers.

The customer was transitioning to become a privatized government organization that quickly had to adapt to the mores of market forces. A focus on costs and cost control became essential to remain competitive. They expected a partnership from their insurance provider to help them reduce costs in whatever way.

Being such a partner was not the primary expertise of my client. They decided to go beyond the boundaries of their organization to help the customer in this development phase. And asked me to reshape the cooperation from a customer-supplier relationship into a strategic partnership. 

Bring back the passion

The biggest challenge was to redefine the cooperation between a B2B customer and its service provider. Strategic partnership became the key topic to work on. To accomplish a partnership, we did three interventions.

The first intervention was to have one-on-one meetings with stakeholders. After these meetings, it became apparent that the current cooperation looked like a long-standing marriage where the spouses took each other for granted. The collaboration concentrated on a few key players. Their interaction was very effective for day-to-day business but lacked the spark to enhance the partnership further. 

The second intervention was to bring new people to the table, and change the dynamic between the key players. This intervention changed the interaction, redefined the communication processes, and brought new ideas into the meetings between the key players. 

The third intervention was to start new initiatives in which both parties participated. Through experimentation, they co-created new solutions that led to tangible financial benefits and positioned my client as a board-level partner for operational risk management. Until recently, this was unthinkable.

Takeaways from this engagement

The engagement taught me three valuable lessons:

1. The most important is the value to clients of your knowledge, experience, expertise, and networks. These attributes are the most underestimated and untapped quality of professional service providers.

2. Leverage the power of your network. As a midcorp organization, you don't have all expertise in-house. But you know others who can help your client with issues that are not your expertise. Those contacts are valuable for your clients, too.

3. Dare to invest in helping your customer if needed, even if this goes beyond your expertise. You put yourself ahead of competitors and build a relationship that clients don't like to lose. 

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