With product innovation and operational efficiency easily duplicated in today’s global marketplace, customer intimacy has become the remaining differentiating strategic option for building and sustaining a market leadership position.  

In order to achieve customer intimacy, the organization must be aligned to consistently deliver high-value customer experiences.  While this may sound straightforward, most business leaders will agree that it can be one of the most complex and puzzling business problems to overcome.  No matter what size your company is, anticipating and understanding how to meet the challenges of your customer intimacy initiative will give you a leg up.

Overcoming Organizational Mis-Alignment
One of the first challenges that must be tackled is overcoming inefficiencies created by internal functional silos.  Silos make it difficult to identify areas that need improving.  By their very nature, vertical leaders are interested in improving their respective domains.  They are measured and compensated on their ability to drive profit in their area of responsibility.  This conflict makes it difficult, if not impossible, to prioritize improvement projects, and points to the need for an objective, fact-based way to assess customer facing capabilities in all departments as well as across the company, which I’ll detail further on.

Uncovering Improvement Needs
Your next challenge is obtaining the insight you need to make wise business investments will need to come from these sources:

Converting Data to Intelligence
Some of the required information already resides in your organization.  Companies typically have immeasurable amounts of customer data in multiple systems, but haven’t harnessed it into a meaningful format.  Identify where the critical data resides and gather it into a meaningful, management dashboard (composite view), and you’ll have a portion of the insight you need for ongoing intelligent decision-making.  Lets call this type of insight, the “rear-view mirror”.

Voice of the Customer
Driving your organization with insight obtained only from your past customer interactions can be dangerous—like trying to drive your car using only your rear-view mirror.  

That’s why it’s important to ask your customers and prospects intelligent questions and listen carefully to what they are telling you.  These questions should attempt to reveal their loyalty drivers—would they recommend your company, products and services to others; what do they value about working with your company and your competitors as well as what they don’t like?

An Honest Assessment of Your Company
The third and final piece of business insight comes from completing an objective assessment of your company’s customer-facing capabilities that takes nothing for granted.  The Customer Alignment Maturity Model Index (CAMMI™) is a scientific method to help companies accomplish this objective.  Based on applied research with companies in multiple industries over the past five years, CAMMI™ helps business executives effectively assess the maturity level of their customer-focused business capabilities.

Determining the Right Actions
With your intelligence in hand, you can plan your work and effectively allocate resources for incremental improvement projects.  A sequence of projects will keep your company from biting off more than it can chew at any given time.  Change in small doses is more easily digested.

Developing a Vision and Strategy Roadmap is crucial as evidenced by two companies that spent the same amount of money on their customer alignment initiatives.  One company developed a clear plan, focusing on a logical sequence of projects, while the other used a shotgun approach, focusing on improving individual functional silos.  The second company slid backwards, lost market share to competition, and had to delay their planned IPO and other strategic initiatives.

An instrumental part of any plan is developing the metrics for determining early on if the plan is working.  Relying exclusively on quarterly financial results to indicate warning signs is risky.  Gaps that appear early in the quarter will have gotten a foothold by the time your results indicate a problem, and you could lose market share you gain or the stake you already have.  

Using a combination of financial and non-financial indicators specific to the performance improvement project at hand is a better approach.  Non-financial metrics should include regular customer feedback through surveys structured to gain actionable insight, rather than simply a general satisfaction index.

In addition, completing an annual CAMMI™ as part of your budgeting and planning cycle will reveal specific, quantifiable improvements and help you adjust future plans.  A frequent review of your management dashboard will help ensure staying ahead of shifts in customer needs and actions and minimize alignment gaps.  Once again, the insight, gap analysis, and roadmap will help you decide what needs to be done where and with whom.

Embracing Cultural Change
People will make or break your customer intimacy initiative.  They need to understand why change is happening as much as they understand what is happening.  Communicate the vision to them and empower them to make decisions that support the strategy.  To make them accountable, align their compensation to support the vision for organizational improvement.
Helping your customer-facing team become more efficient and more effective is job number one for improving the customer experience.  

Our experience has shown that the most productive and least threatening way to start is by introducing technology solutions to help your team accomplish their jobs more efficiently.  Over time, we recommend identifying and institutionalizing best practices (processes and people) to help make them more effective.

The final point regards your company’s leadership.  It is important to recognize that achieving customer intimacy will not happen overnight, but a Chief Customer Officer (CCO) who reports to the CEO or president is an effective catalyst.  Fast becoming a fixture in companies aggressively pursuing customer intimacy, a CCO is responsible for executing your customer management strategy.  Functional leaders will recognize the CCO’s authority and look to him or her for guidance.  We’ve seen lower level point-people who didn’t have the budget or authority (and probably the experience) fail to rally the troops and get results.

Customer intimacy is all about aligning people, processes and technology with the customer experience.  It’s the key to market leadership and when planned and executed correctly, it’s worth the journey.