Why Building Customer Intimacy is the Key to Long-Term Success in Business
Is customer intimacy a new buzzword in the town? Instead, it is a long-term value-building strategy that encourages organizations to create a relationship with customers that is deeper and lasts long. It focuses on moving from transactional customer relationships to establishing an emotional connection between a person and the brand.
Customer intimacy is an approach that treats customers differently and acknowledges their unique journey by closely perceiving, anticipating, and fulfilling their needs. Customer intimacy is dedicated to providing lifetime value to your customers. It is ultimately a customer-centric model, which is not easy to achieve.
The most considerable difficulty that a company faces while creating a customer-centric model is that it reverses the natural concept of a business and places people before their short-term benefit. They go for a relational rather than a transactional approach, which entirely conflicts with how they are organized and run.
So what makes organizations adopt a customer intimacy strategy?
It may be because they know that loyal customers buy more over time. Or they are influenced by the percentage of people (58%) who consider customer intimacy as the primary value discipline for their organizations.
Now let’s see how to achieve excellent customer intimacy in the market!
Strengthening customer touch points!
In the realm of digitization, there comes a new way every day to reach a prospect online. However, the more opportunities to interact with customers, the better. Below are some traditional and digital touchpoints that are capable of contributing to growing customer intimacy:
- Sale Papers
- Emails
- Apps
- Blogs and content
- Search engine queries
- Websites and events
- Employees
- Social media appearance
Data Integration!
In today’s multi-channel environment, as mentioned above, there are multiple windows open for customers to connect with a business. Hence businesses need a more secure solution that can scale up to manage this data and can create unified customer profiles. A customer identity management platform can do so. A cIAM solution uses progressive profiling to gather customer information in bits and pieces and helps provide a better customer experience.
Data collection and integration is the starting point that helps make a clear picture of your customers and their behaviors. By understanding how they interact with your brand and what they expect, you can deliver an experience that forces them to visit you repeatedly.
Customer service management!
Exceptional service is the key to earning customer loyalty. To build a customer-oriented company, it is necessary to offer consistent and quality service, quick response time, and open channels for better communication. When customers feel valued, it shows in the company’s revenue.
Internal Brand activation!
When you put your customers at the center of your business strategy, your entire organization needs to think like a customer. This change in thoughts will help you stay competitive, innovate, and understand what breaks or makes your customer's trust. Active engagement toward a successful customer intimacy strategy increases productivity by about 22% or more and directly impacts customer satisfaction.
Build emotional loyalty!
In today’s cost-conscious environment, it is not hard to say that a customer who often makes purchases from you would stray away from someone who is offering a product at cheaper prices until and unless he has no personal relationship with you. Hence it is expected to build an emotional connection with your customers. The customer intimacy strategy inspires organizational units to step forward in nurturing this personal connection.
Happier customers bring higher ROI opportunities. Hence gear up your overall marketing efforts towards customer intimacy to better engage your audience and boost your company culture.
