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What You Should
Do As a Customer-Intimate Company |
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Take
responsibility for your customers' results. This
emanates from sharing information and
building trust.
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See
your customers' problems as your own. Remember
that customer intimacy is the best way to create hard,
tangible, rewarding results for both sides.
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Engage
in truly cooperative partnerships with your customers.
Integrate your operations with those of your customers to
develop new products, services, or solutions.
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Why Customer Intimacy?
Customer intimacy is the largest source of your
growth,
sustainable competitive advantage,
and profit. Everyone in your organization should practice it.
Customer-intimate companies bring an entirely fresh perspective. They
discover unsuspected problems, detect unrealized potential, and create a
dynamic
synergy with customers. They often merge their operations with those of
their customers. In the integration of their operations, suppliers become
more than merely useful: They become indispensable.1
Customer Intimacy As a
Competitive Advantage
Businesses have traditionally relied on
technology and
product innovation for
competitive advantage. However, as products
became commodities due to global competition and relentless technological
advances, the battleground for
differentiation
and
customer value creation
shifted to customer intimacy and
service. This service-focused
competitive strategy has worked well
for numerous companies across various industry sectors.
New Mindset – a New Way of
Doing Business
Customer-intimate companies develop a new
mindset –
a new way
of doing business – with new
values,
new
vision,
new
strategies, new
systems, and new structures. They are in the business of
creating new value for their customers. Rather than simply react to
their customers' every whim, customer-intimate suppliers discover how to
provide complete solutions to customers' needs.
Competitive
Strategies: 2 Types
Customer
Care
Surprise
To Win: 3 Strategies
Customer Intimacy vs.
Customer Satisfaction
"Customer intimacy doesn't call for increasing
customer satisfaction. It requires
taking responsibility for customer results. It doesn't impose arm's length
goodwill. It requires down-in-the-trenches solidarity, the exchange of
useful information, and the cooperative pursuit of results."1
Benefits To Your
Organization1
Customer intimacy
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gives senior managers a new
vision of the future, a strategy that makes sense, and the tactics
to make it work.
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helps sales and account managers
build deeper and more productive relationships with selected
customers, arming them with a real-world model of success in their
battle to unite factory and field.
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helps
human-resource professionals
to deal with a most sensitive challenge of the
commitment to
deliver results
– to integrate the supplier's personnel into a customer's operation.
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helps information-technology professionals
leverage emerging innovation: keeping information flowing back and
forth to customers, and coaching them on how to get the best results
with that information.
Case in Point
25 Lessons from Jack Welch
Jack Welch's
goal was to make
GE "the world's
most competitive enterprise." Welch believed in trying to know every
employee and every customer, just like a village grocer.
Welch even nicknamed GE "the grocery store": "What is important at the
grocery store is just as important in engines or medical systems. If the
customer isn't satisfied, if the stuff is getting stale, if the shelf isn't
right, or if the offerings aren't right, it's the same thing. You manage it
like a small organization. You don't get hung on zeros."
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