What is “customer intimacy”?
Customer intimacy can be defined as the formal or informal set of relationships established between supplier and customer, with a diverse array of partners, from corporate leadership to functional leadership (engineering, marketing, operations, maintenance, or service) and end-users of products or services. These dynamic relationships provide multiple points and frequency of contacts between the company and its customer, as well as multiple points of view about the relationship and its benefits to both parties. What are the benefits of “customer intimacy”? First, from the supplier side, customer intimacy impacts revenue growth and earnings per share by creating long-term, sustainable competitive advantage through the early identification of unsatisfied needs. Contrary to the all-too-common syndrome of “if we can make it, they will buy it” that is prevalent in technology-driven companies, customer intimacy allows the adoption of a “customer-need-pull” strategy, as opposed to a “technolo
