Profit Power of Customer Intimacy: Deliver Top Line Revenue and Earnings Growth
Regardless of industry segment, progressive CEOs and Board of Directors are looking for the silver bullet to consistently deliver top-line revenue and earnings growth, as means to increase share price and shareholders value.
Numerous articles are being published promoting the importance of customer satisfaction, and ways to improve it, or touting the needs and means to flawless execution, or the benefits of process reengineering, or of outsourcing to lower-cost regions such as China, India, Latin America or Eastern Europe.
These can, indeed, be good strategies towards better profitability. However, a much-less-publicized yet fundamental lever of higher and sustainable shareholders returns is customer intimacy. Customer intimacy impacts shareholders returns for both sides: the supplier side as well as the customer side.
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...