Customer Intimacy

What is customer intimacy?

Are you confident about the products and services you offer, but feel you’re lacking in customer retention? Sure, you know about customer focus, and you make it a priority—but have you heard of customer intimacy? This tricky value could be the one thing you’re overlooking—and the key to keeping your customers coming back for more, thus giving your brand the nudge it needs to go from good to great.

• Customer intimacy is pretty much what it sounds like. It’s all about getting to know your customer—the most important element of your business—and putting in the work to intimately understand their wants and needs. Businesses lose $1.6 trillion each year to customer switching, and

of buyers cite customer experience as an important factor in purchasing decisions. From a marketing standpoint, the concept of customer intimacy seeks to build strong, meaningful relationships between brands and their customers in order to retain their business for years to come—a priority for any company.

• The idea of customer intimacy is one of three components in

tailoring products and services to meet clients’ needs to the best extent. A company that delivers value based on this concept also builds bonds with clients like those between good old friends. Customer intimate companies provide their stuff in a way that they can offer the ‘best total solution’. Home Depot, Amazon, and Salesforce are among those organizations that show that level of understanding.”

There’s more to it than just maintaining a civil and productive candor with your client. Effective customer intimacy means using some specific tools and techniques to actively nurture these relationships into long-lasting ones that grow into exponentially more exciting new ventures. After all, your clients—and their word-of-mouth praise about your stellar customer relations—are what truly make your business thrive. All the cool products and services you can dream up don’t mean much without the customers who utilize them.

Why is it valuable?

You have your lineup of loyal customers with whom you seem to have a cordial and productive enough relationship—so why should you go out of your way to make customer intimacy a newly sharpened focus for your company? Will that extra effort really make a difference in helping you succeed in the marketplace?

• “The companies that remain most closely connected to customers are winning. And you can’t be customer-centric without cultivating and maintaining

• .”

• From

• , companies that have taken leadership positions in their industries in the last decade have done so by focusing on delivering superior customer value in one of those three value disciplines—operational excellence, product leadership or customer intimacy. They excel in one of these disciplines while meeting industry standards in the other two.

Companies who put operational excellence first focus on providing their customers with a reliable product or service with minimal difficulty (Think Dell). Those who excel in product leadership, on the other hand, are all about the unrivaled quality of the product itself (Think Nike). While each value has its own benefits, customer intimacy is known as the value which secures the most customer loyalty. And in a marketplace where 67% of customers will switch to a competitor after just one negative experience, and US dealerships lose $266 billion per year due to lack of retention, you can’t afford to let customer relations take the backburner.

If this is something your company could use a boost in, and if the structure of the company is well suited for tailoring its products and services to best serve the customer, then customer intimacy may be the value discipline to focus on.

“Companies that push the boundaries of one value discipline while meeting industry standards in the other two gain such a lead that competitors find it hard to catch up.”

Customer intimacy can yield “increased loyalty, lower churn, less internal strife, more loveable products, and more effective team decision-making.” It also fosters bold innovation, as employees constantly strive for more and more effective solutions for their customer.

• There are a number of ways to keep tabs on customer intimacy, including metrics such as “word-of-mouth (more), product adoption rate (high),

How to improve customer intimacy

• “True

can only arrive through aligning the product development, manufacturing, administrative functions and executive focus around the needs of the individual customer.”

Customer intimacy means tailoring products and services to meet the precise, unique needs of each customer. It also means responding with great agility to any need that arises. This requires two main things:
• 1. A team devoted to acquiring detailed customer knowledge, and
  2. Extreme flexibility.

Customer intimacy focused companies facilitate multiple modes of delivering their products or services, rather than sticking to a strict, one-size-fits-all process.

Consider TRACER, an electrical diagnostics software created by Tweddle Group. TRACER is tailored specifically to automotive diagnostic teams by integrating with their existing OE Tier 1 and dealership test systems. The software runs on machines already in their service bay, so there is no need for the customer to invest in new technology or hardware—TRACER was designed specifically with these technicians in mind, tailored to suit their precise needs.

One way to improve customer intimacy is to ensure that all employees—from CEO to intern—have a hand in customer support. When every team member connects with the customer, customer intimacy spreads and consequently deepens. Things like customer advisory boards and customer interviews are also a great way to increase customer intimacy.

Take some time to consider which of the three core value disciplines best suits your company, and then focus on making it your number one priority. If you’re like Amazon, Home Depot and Tweddle Group, customer intimacy is the value that will set you apart from your competitors. Make sure your team is all on the same page, and decide on a few methods you’ll put into action to secure this as your core value—like getting everyone involved in customer support, and setting up customer interviews or surveys. Next, set up some metrics to gauge your progress, such as a process to keep track of your product adoption rate relative to your customer relations. With proper planning, efficient execution and long-term consistency, customer intimacy will take your company to the next tier of success in the marketplace.