What is customer intimacy?

To keep your business running, it is not enough just to have satisfied customers. You need loyal customers. That is because acquiring a new customer is five to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one.

So, no matter what business you are in, listening to your customers in order to retain their business is essential. And to do that, you need customer intimacy.

Customer intimacy is about understanding the needs, wants, and opinions of customers and potential customers, with the goal of nurturing a long-term relationship. Through close communication, you will be better able to help them get the most out of your products or services.

When you take noise, cost and conflict out of your customer relationships and replace these with continuous improvements in service , you will be able to delight your customers by anticipating and responding to their every need. Over time, this means your company will be easier and cheaper to do business with, compared with your competitors.

And the better the service you offer your customer, the more likely you are to get paid on time!

This intimacy starts early in each customer relationship. It is based on early and repeated customer contact for clear and consistent communication, as well as rapid responses to errors or omissions, however trivial, wherever found and however identified.

This relationship-building process is a core element of the Virtuous Revenue Cycle, which aims to improve your Days Sales Outstanding metric and ensure that you get paid on time.

Focusing on customer intimacy will enable you to feel reassured, because you will also regain control of customer payments. You will see your business move forward because cash flow gains traction when you rev up sales. You will look forward to calling customers as a contribution to customer service, rather than a drain on your valuable time.

There is no doubt that technology can help companies operate more efficiently and support growth by reducing operating costs, accelerate cycle times, and aggregate useful data for decision-making.

But when you get paid late, it is because a human being has made a decision to pay you late. A machine does what it is programmed to do. No amount of technology is going to change this, and the solution always lies in increased intimacy between people.

True customer intimacy can only be achieved by aligning your whole team, starting from the top management to product development, manufacturing, and administrators. It takes time to develop, and it is built upon a bedrock of professionalism, openness and service.

Our book Let the Cash Flow helps you get a deeper understanding of how building genuine intimacy with custom­ers enables longer-term relationships and puts you at the front of the queue when it comes to getting paid. Get our book here.