Mba 520

Introduction

Customer Intimacy is the superior management of the customer experience and relationship and is the new commitment of Intersect Investment Company (IIC). Customer Intimacy demands to deliver a higher level of service to every customer across all channels, product lines, and geographies (webMethods). Simply stated, it means knowing a customer’s wants and needs and delivering, or even anticipating their wants before the request is ever made (webMethods). It is an experienced based loyalty that promotes a valued customer perception. A customer intimacy model implementation is exactly the plan that Intersect Investments has established within their corporation and all the goals they plan to achieve.

Throughout this research and defense synopsis you will discover the developments and benchmarks used to deliver this plan. In addition, the implementations of these plans will be detailed and evaluated to ensure Intersect Investment’s long term success. In order to move forward with these plans, IIC will establish a value proposition strategy, a customer pyramid model, and will focus on company and client integrity. The execution of these plans and the customer intimacy model will require a cost and value analysis, continual customer communication, tiers or classifications of the pyramid, and realistic timelines. All goals will be monitored and measured for data analysis via IIC weekly meetings, continual customer feedback and customer surveys. The identification of the new vision and mission statement that Intersect Investment Company has previously established is a big step forward in meeting their end-state goals but it’s only the beginning in solution implementation.

Step 7 вЂ" Develop/Benchmark

Intersect Investment Services holds aspirations of achieving financial success through providing quality long-term customer relationships and becoming a dominant corporation within the financial services industry. There are several problems impeding Intersect Investment’s transition from a mediocre financial organization to an industry leading successful financial organization. First, Intersect Investment must identify methods to increase their company’s profitability in order to realize their ambitions of growth within the financial services industry. Second, the organization will need to address the issue of their company’s integrity. Then, identify ways in which to improve on the employee and consumer level. Finally, Intersect Investment must determine how to provide exceptional customer relations to their clientele. Intersect Investments objective is to become financially successful through the development of their company in the financial services field by providing the best relationships possible to their customers. In addition, their plan is to improve relationships within their business by employing plans to improve communication. Effective benchmarking has shown that the successful implementation of a customer intimacy model can produce a majority of desirable results. An evaluation of the customer intimacy strategy has revealed it as an advantageous solution to the issues facing Intersect Investment Services. Furthermore, a customer intimacy model meets the criteria set forth by the end-state goals that were previously stated.

A customer intimacy model will prove to be very beneficial to the Intersect Investment Services organization. First, Intersect Investment needs to establish a value proposition. When seeking to deliver significantly superior customer value the marketer must clearly define, communicate, and deliver a “value proposition” which is recognized by the target market as a better proposition than that presented by competitors (Christopher 59). The argument is that customers are more likely to stay with suppliers if they believe that the relative customer value received from a current supplier is higher than that on offer elsewhere (Christopher 60). By employing a value proposition plan, Intersect Investment will retain the valued customers and draw in new clientele. Another advantage to this plan is that it will ensure their competitiveness among the leading companies in the financial services industry. Second, Intersect Investment will construct a customer pyramid. Using the customer pyramid is helpful whenever a company has customers that differ in profitability but are delivering the same levels of service to all customers (Pitta, Franzaka, & Fowler 426). In these situations, the firm is using limited resources to stretch across a wide group of customers avoiding the possibility of under-serving their best customers (Pitta, Franzaka, & Fowler 426). For example, using its own version of the customer pyramid method, Bank of America classifies its customers into three levels roughly equivalent to excellent, good, and average based on their contributions to bank profitability (Pitta, Franzaka, & Fowler 427). Once customers are identified and classified into profitability tiers, firms can attempt to build relationships to enhance customer loyalty while, more importantly, build profitability (Pitta, Franzaka, & Fowler 427). Third, Intersect Investment will improve its integrity on both a clientele and professional level. On the professional level the company has replaced the Executive Vice President of Marketing and Sales. Janet Angelo the new EVP has started weekly focus group meetings for employees to voice their opinions and concerns to EVP Janet Angelo and Joel Contino, VP of marketing. These meetings also serve to allow the management the opportunity to communicate their plans and strategies to the employees. Another effective way to improve personnel relations within the organization is to invest in iRise Inc.’s interactive simulation technology. This technology allows companies to visualize new business applications in order to understand how these products would impact an organizations operation (Matteson 30). By investing in the simulation, companies are substantially reducing the cost and time associated with getting the right business application to market (Matteson 34). Companies are also improving the quality of their final products by testing the simulations with line-of-business owners’, and their end usersвЂ"before a single line of code is written (Matteson 34). As innovative ideas are transformed into new products, the simulation technology has proven to be an efficient way to communicate progress on critical projects to non-technical business executives and managersвЂ"the people out on the front lines (Matteson 34). When improving integrity on a clientele level it can be as easy as just remembering what to say. A successful implementation of the customer intimacy