How many of us are actually able to get out of our own heads in order to see things from the perspectives of others, and when we do, how long are we able to stay in that place? It's such a difficult proposition that the very concept of customer intimacy – which is a technical term for attempting to walk in someone else's moccasins – inspires the writing of business books, journal articles, newspaper columns, and blogs blogs blogs.

If you have ever gone through the process of selling a home while still living in it (yes, we are still selling our home), then you know what I mean. The realtor – if she's any good – works with you to stage your home. She tells you to start crating your art work. That's hard to swallow – you love your art work. But you're motivated to sell the house, so you try to wrap your mind around why you're so upset about being asked to do so. After all, once you move into your new home you'll be able to see it all again. Eventually you realize that your real issue is that the art in your home defines you. It tells the people who walk in your home a little bit about who you are and what you value. Besides, you think the house simply looks better with the art on display.

From the perspective of the home shopper, they don't care who you are. The less present you are while they are looking at a house they are trying to imagine as their own, the better. And there's a good chance they don't have your taste in art. Yet a realtor told me that one of the most difficult things to do is to get the seller to remove the art from the walls. Perhaps they are motivated to sell their house, but they just can't see the transaction from the buyer's perspective.

Many years ago I was working with a client who had a chain of retail stores. His sales had dropped dramatically. An evaluation of changes in the past 24 months indicated that a multi-store redesign had taken place at the beginning of the decline in sales. The owner had eliminated the cash register station near the front of the store and replaced it with an enclosed island in the center of the store toward the back. Sure enough, the stores that had not been redesigned (due to space or other considerations) did not experience the dramatic same-store revenue reductions that the redesigned stores experienced. Observing traffic in the two types of stores was very instructive. In the non-redesigned stores, the clerks were roaming about the store at all times, and they were frequently at the front of the store to greet incoming customers. The clerks in the redesigned stores had a tendency to stay within their islands and weren't available to greet the customers. Two things astounded me. The first – that the management of the chain hadn't considered the impact of redesign from the customers' perspective in the first place. The second – that when I presented my conclusion they wouldn't accept it. The owner's argument against changing back to the original layout or modifying the new layout was that it would be expensive, though in truth, he was simply enamored of what he considered to be a modern store layout. The cost to rehabilitate the stores would have been roughly $20,000. The chain was out of business less than 12 months later.

It can be difficult to develop sensitivity to the customer. Back in my college years when I was bartending I had great customer sensitivity (I can't bring myself to use the term intimacy in this context). My customers sat across the bar from me one or more times each week and told me all their problems. I knew from the looks on their faces and their body language what type of day they'd had when they walked in. But 25 years later I was the CEO of a company with a few hundred thousand customers. No body language or facial expressions to work with there. Of course, by then I knew how to slice and dice and segment the data, and once we did that we produced overlays and extracts, and we called the decisions we made as a result "customer intimacy." Yay us.

Then I'd go to a trade show and mingle with my customers, and they'd tell me about things we were doing wrong, things we could do better, and how the world looked from their perspective. And in some cases it would be clear that our slicing, dicing and segmenting had not prevented us from making inferior choices. Why? How could it be that the best practices of the direct marketing industry and the recommendations made by MIT and Harvard Business School professors could not lead us to the promised land of customer intimacy?

Here's why. Database analysis to study customers is a lot like looking at the animals in the zoo. Don't get me wrong - you can learn a lot. But it's an observation, not an experience. How the heck did we get to the point where the word intimacy, which means a close association or connection, of or relating to inner character or essential nature (according to Webster's unabridged) – how did we start applying that word to a business concept that most people interpret to mean "figure out what your customers buy, when they buy it, how they buy it, and why they buy it – and use that information to sell them more of it" ?

Treacy and Wiersema coined the term customer intimacy in their book The Discipline of Market Leaders. Their intention, in the tiniest of nutshells, was to point out that companies whose value propositions depend on being perceived by their customers as the best option for service must build a culture around that concept. Sales and service people need to be empowered in those organizations to serve the customers' needs, make decisions for the customers' benefits, and put the customers' interests front-and-center. The rest of the organization must accept this leadership by sales and service, and themselves take up the customer cause. (for previous entries related Treacy & Wiersema's theories, click here and here).

A company with a sales force that has direct relationships with customers and can advocate for those specific customers within the organization can achieve customer intimacy. But in this world of mega-companies that serve hundreds of thousands of customers through indirect means, such as the internet and via toll-free numbers, the pursuit of customer intimacy through segmentation and analysis is impracticable. You may be able to describe the animals behind the bars, but that doesn't mean you understand them.

So is the pursuit of customer intimacy a lost cause? I don't think so. But it's not easy, and what it requires (even in companies that fit well within the Treacy and Wiersema mold) is what we find it most difficult as humans to do. It requires us to see the world from a perspective other than our own. I was reading an article in Multichannel Merchant today about designing store windows, and the author was recommending that merchants walk outside the store and view the windows as the customers would view them. Makes sense, right? Yet how many store managers do you think will walk outside the store, stare at the handiwork and take pleasure in the result, observe the various products and make sure they are set out properly to highlight the features, and then go back inside the store?

What's wrong with that? Well, did the store manager walk backward from the window to observe how the window appears from 5-, 10-, 35-, or 60-feet away? Did she walk all the way to the right, then all the way to the left, to see how the window looks from each angle? Did she ask someone completely unfamiliar with the product to describe to her what that person saw, in an effort to eliminate the bias she (the manager) has because she already knows what the display is supposed to be showing? Unfortunately, few people think that way.

Years ago a guy named Joe Lovato used to sit in a cubicle outside my office and provide technical support to customers. I've got a lot of great stories about how he took care of his customers, but for the purpose of illustrating today's concept, one story stands out. A customer had called to complain about a piece of equipment they had purchased. Joe was always good at asking questions and getting to the bottom of what was wrong, but this time I heard him ask, "Can you tell me what you were hoping it would do?" He asked this in all seriousness, with not an iota of sarcasm. He asked the customer about their hopes, and in the process, both learned how to help the customer and validated the customer. Most technical support people – even very good ones – stick to trying to tell the customer how the product in question is supposed to perform, and focus on discerning what the customer has done wrong. Asking a customer about what they hoped is a profound way of saying "I want to see this from your perspective." I'll never forget that.

Unfortunately, for every Joe, there is an art director who looks down on the customer to whom they are selling, a narcissistic product manager who makes every customer issue a referendum on herself, a bored sales person just trying to meet his quota, a customer support person going through a nasty divorce, a sycophantic marketing person who simply agrees with whoever is in power, and a copywriter who has no clue what the customer does with the product they are writing about. I don't care where you work – you were probably able to picture at least two of these people.

As with so many business issues, the key to achieving customer intimacy lies in hiring. Hiring people with enough maturity (it's not an age thing) and emotional intelligence (which means they didn't have to read the book) to recognize the importance of learning about their business, their products, and their services from the customers' perspective. Hiring people with enough compassion and passion to actually want to know who other people are and what makes them tick. Hiring people who recognize the inherent value of others, not as a matter of personal pride, but because that's just how they behave. Because the goal isn't just to admire someone's moccasins, nor is it to try them on. It's to walk a mile in them. And if you want to get the mileage out of your customer intimacy program, that's what you and your entire organization will need to learn to do.

(c) 2008. Andrea M. Hill