Customer Intimacy
What is Customer Intimacy?
Treacy & Wiersema’s value discipline of tailoring solutions, service and relationships to a customer’s particular situation. The business invests in deep account knowledge and flexible delivery to improve customer outcomes over time. Porter’s differentiation can include this service and relationship approach.
How Customer Intimacy works
Requires deep account knowledge, flexible delivery and a relationship-driven organization. Tends to earn Switching costs (relational and procedural).
Case studies tagged with Customer Intimacy
Each link opens the passage tagged with this concept.
The question to ask of a company
What did the company implement, for whom, against which alternative, and how was this approach intended to change customer value or economics? Continuing account knowledge and flexible delivery define the way the company wins.
Examples
- Salesforce enterprise; Veeva; Palantir's forward-deployed model; IBM services.
Who names it — 2 of the canon
| Author | What they call it / where it appears |
|---|---|
| Treacy & Wiersema | Customer intimacy |
| Porter | Differentiation (service and relationship form) |
Note. Choose the leading discipline for the specific business and meet acceptable standards in the other two. Examine staffing, measures and resource allocation for evidence of that commitment. Customer Discovery tests assumptions about customer needs; Customer Intimacy is a continuing choice about how to serve customers and win.