Printed with permission from Andrew Gibbons. "Mentoring, Team Leader Development, Management Development Programmes, Customer Service Development"

From: Customer Intimacy
Fred Wiersma
Harper Collins 1997 221 pages
ISBN 0 00 255821 1

P 7 "The suppliers who lead today's markets are those that constantly think about their customers.

They analyse their systems, recognise their flaws, challenge their assumptions, and assume
responsibility for initiating change".

P 10 "As more and more customers experience exceptional performance - whatever it takes to solve their problems - fewer and fewer will settle for anything less".

P 15 "The problem is that although many companies hear the swelling chorus of demands, they cannot, try as they may, respond properly".

P 21 "Today it would be difficult to find a company that doesn't claim to be a customer-oriented, customer-focused, or even customer-driven enterprise. But look a little closer at how those companies put their assertions into practice, and often you discover an array of notions and assumptions that range from superficial and incomplete to misguided".

P 26 "If service recovery becomes part of the standard operating procedure, it can mask the underlying problems and cause the same mishaps again and again".

P 27 "Although faultless service is more or less invisible and rarely makes for good anecdotes, companies that can provide it don't end up spending endless time, money and energy cleaning up after their messes. And instinctively, customers turn to the company that makes the fewest mistakes".

"Beware of cheerful superheros who forget their job exists only because of disasters that should never happen".

P 31 "Customer-intimate companies know their customers don't buy a product or service. They buy its benefits. The bigger the benefits, the more the product or service they'll buy".

P 35 "There's truth in the old saw that when customers ask for a drill, what they really want is holes. Delivering the right drills means asking what kind of holes they need".

P 49 "If I were to pick the single most important question a customer-intimate company can ask about its
customer, it would have to be: what's the real problem here? Not the troublesome symptoms, not the complicating circumstances. What is the basis, the actuality, the root of it all? Before a company can fulfil the first commitment of intimacy - to direct its customer to a total solution - it must answer that central question".

P 84 "In educating customers about all the potential - and previously unexploded - uses of its product, a company increases the product's value to customers and propels sales".

P 86 "Companies that adore technology and the minutiae of design have a tendency to overlook the possibility that their customers may not understand what their products actually do".

P 123 "Managers yearn to see trust-based customer connections in their firms, yet they have a deep- rooted concern about getting burned. Or they worry about being seen as a 'softy' who doesn't truly grasp what 'real managers' have always known - that business is essentially an antagonistic affair, that competition and ruthlessness always win".

P 129 "Customer-intimate companies choose their clientele based more on the future promise they represent than on their current appeal and buying habits".

P 131 "The potential customer must be open about cost structures and strategies. If that openness is not present from the start, it's unlikely to develop".

P 135 "It's vital to recognise your ideal customers. It's also smart to recognise the red flags that signal an apparently appealing prospect that could mean trouble".

Three types of customer that will not welcome efforts towards developing intimacy:

"The first are those with a history of one-time buying. Such customers use the market in standard fashion, shopping around to obtain the best deal. They have no record of standing by one or a few of their suppliers. They chase short-term gains rather than the benefits of a close, lasting connection with a particular company".

P 136 "The self-sufficient, control-obsessed customers constitute a second troublesome category...they're do-it-yourselfers. Intimacy makes them nervous. Their managers feel the need to control everything in their business, and, consequently, they strive to control everything in their supplier's businesses as well".

"In addition to being aggravating, those customers have no interest in broader solutions. They don't value the broad range of what customer intimacy has to offer".

"The last category of prospects have no patience. They won't take the time to bring a longer-term
relationship to fruition...they're not inclined to invest time to find what ultimately might be a better
solution...such people can't imagine that long-term intimacy might benefit their business".

P 137 "Suppliers who want to develop customer-intimate relationships must reduce the number of their customers, or they'll never be able to spend the time and effort needed to establish a rewarding connection with any of them".

P 146 On a customer/supplier whitewater rafting to develop trust and interdependence: "When customer and supplier have struggled to forage for dinner on the forest floor or to steer the raft from dangerous rapids, the once-insurmountable problems take more manageable form".

P 154 "In customer-intimate connections, communication can occur in unexpected forms. Customer councils are an example of how supplier and customers can share honest, constructive feedback.

A customer council meeting lets managers from several client organisations meet with their supplier to share experiences and ideas for improving their connection".

P 161 "To provide individualised solutions, the customer-intimate firm operates more like a collection of niche businesses than a monolith. Its closeness to the customer is mirrored in its open, flexible, co-operative processes and operations. More than most other companies, a customer-intimate company is truly knowledge-hungry, forever striving to get smarter about its markets, its customers, its customers' competitors, and the state of its art".

P 165 "I've heard customer-intimate executives cite the old adage that you can't move a piece of string by pushing the tail end of it. You have to get out front and pull".

P 173 "Meeting customer's needs with customised solutions is an essential aspect of a customer-intimate policy, and certain managers find it untenable. Those people prefer to deal with an orderly and predictable world, where one's duty is reduced to repeating identical tasks. Variety and diversity, and the attendant uncertainty are upsetting".

P 176 "Companies, by dedicating themselves to providing better and better results for their customers, also commit themselves to a new kind of double-entry bookkeeping. They've got to track not only their own results but their customers' as well".

P 186 "There are three sets of questions I ask companies aspiring to customer intimacy. The first is about customer results: Do you truly know how you have affected the customer's results?

If you do, do you measure this on a regular basis, in tangible terms, and do you share that set of measurements with the customer? And perhaps trickiest and most important of all, does the customer agree with the interpretation".

P 187 "The second set of questions relates, precisely, to reward and incentive systems: Have the ways you measure and motivate people been properly designed to deliver superior results and retain customers? Do they encourage teamwork both internally and with intermediaries and customers? Do they track customers' business over more than a single transaction? Do they attract and retain the right kinds of employees? The key rewards - bonuses, raises, promotions - flowing from those measurements must reflect the attainment of better results for customers".

"The last set of questions pertains to the company's use of technology: Is it set up to reinforce the culture of judgement, co-operation and learning? Does it provide the level of substance, timeliness, and ease-of-use that allows the company's measurement, control, and reward systems to deliver results?".

P 189 "Conventional thinking overlooks two essential aspects of customer intimacy. First, what counts is the payoff of the long-term relationship - not the profit from individual transactions. Second, the point of customer intimacy is that suppliers and customers win together. The whole approach relies on their co-operating to enlarge the economic pie that they ultimately share".

P 190 "Companies steeped in the traditional model of transaction economics will find it difficult to analyse the intricacies of co-operation and accurately evaluate the costs".

P 199 "Once a company ascertains the true economics of all pricing situations, its business decisions may take a significant turn. Customers that previously appeared to be most attractive are no longer so appealing. Quite often, a supplier regards big customers as critical until it understands the economics. Similarly, small accounts, once perceived as easy to serve, may reveal themselves as drains on a company's time and resources".

P 212 "Doubters and saboteurs of intimacy lurk in the dark corners of nearly every company. Nothing incites suspicion and fear so quickly as the real and imagined threats inherent in change. The greater the change, the greater the fears".

P 213 "Regardless of starting points and momentum-building moves, the companies I've studied have had two important traits in common: a sense of urgency about customer intimacy and an uplifting team spirit. The significance of these traits can't be underplayed".

The above summary has been provided to you compliments of Andrew Gibbons

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