As business models embrace the subscription model to boost revenues, customers are left with a growing list of subscriptions to manage. Consumers, both enterprise & individual, are always looking to trim unnecessary subscriptions or those that no longer provide enough value for money.  

The balance of power has shifted. The billion-dollar company now goes to extreme lengths to woo the subscriber who pays $5 a month for their product.   

This sentiment is reflected in a study by a consultant who found that 87% of decision-makers ranked improving their relationship with customers as their top priority.  

Customer Intimacy & Its Challenges 

In shorthand, Customer Intimacy(CI) is the art & science of anticipating what your customers need, how they want it and when they want it.  

While traditional CI strategies have bordered on the “art” side, relying on goodwill and polite language to nurture it, the emergence of the data economy has slowly pushed CI into the realm of an actual science. 

The biggest challenge enterprises face when it comes to developing intimacy is micro-segmentation. So far, companies have been making broad generalizations about “customer types” and using these to deal with highly specific individuals.  

This way of lumping together customers based on a handful of demographic characteristics has not been very successful. 

The solution, micro-segmentation, is being implemented now across industries with the help of business analytics tools.  

Keys To Implementing CI Analytics Strategy 

Before the full power of analytics can be leveraged to pull out quantifiable data on CI implementation, enterprises should augment their CRM tools with the below key steps: 

1. Increase Data Harvesting: The broad set of demographic, social, contextual & behavioral data streaming in from traditional customer data warehouse needs to be integrated with mobile & social media channels. Next, this data should be audited for quality & segregated before moving on to the analytics stage. 
2. Leverage analytics to classify customer preferences within context: The cleaned data will provide a rich contextual information on the preferences of new & returning customers. Combined with the attributes of location & new-age data streams, CRM tools can to be augmented to classify customers across micro segments. 
3. Automate your action plan: This microsegment data needs to be acted on immediately. Enterprises cannot afford to waste months sitting on this data before taking action. Customer preferences are volatile and evolve in short time frames. The solution is to automate the entire analytics cycle from generating insights to formulating action plans. 

But while analytics will help to a certain extent, the actual hard lifting is accomplished with a combination of hard skills & soft competencies associated with customer intimacy. 

Join Vijay Swaminathan, CEO & Co-Founder of Draup for a 50-minute interactive session conducted in association with HR.com, where he breaks down and explains what these attributes are.  

Participants can expect: 

• to gain an understanding of Customer Intimacy and Empathy as a catalyst for business growth
• to identify both hard skills and soft competencies associated with Customer Intimacy
• to learn how to cultivate your culture and empower your employees to feel customer needs and act accordingly