Customer Intimacy

July 25th, 2007

“Customer Intimacy”

This vile jargon arrived yesterday in the daily email splooge from CXO Media.

The term is uncomfortable and a little creepy. Is customer intimacy like airplane intimacy or subway intimacy or prison intimacy? It sounds like a windowdressing term, used by companies to mean the exact opposite of the plain language.

What says CXO in their email?

[P]lease join this webcast – hosted by Cisco Systems – as Governor Tom Ridge and Circuit City CIO Bill McCorey reveal valuable insight for retailers looking to strike the right balance between privacy and customer intimacy.

Of course! What could be more intimate than Cisco, which builds special censorship routers for the Chinese, joined by Homeland Security honcho Tom “Patriot Act” Ridge and the Circuit City Information Extractor? And who better than these guardians of liberty to instruct us on ~~data-mining~~ privacy?

Customer intimacy in this sense isn’t the intimacy of the subway all, it’s the intimacy of a mugging.

Meanwhile, on the rest of the Web, “customer intimacy” turns out to be replacement jargon for customer engagement, in the sense of “really really engaged customer engagement, so engaged and close and real and engaged it’s actually intimate.”

I’m imagining the meeting at Clusterfcuk Inc.:

– CEO: I just read a book. Good to Gooder. I read the whole thing. I now realize that I don’t want to be a Good Company, I want to be a Gooder Company!
– VP Sales: You mean more sales?
– CEO: You just don’t get it, do you?
– VP Marcom: He means you can’t just shove things down people’s throats anymore, you have to engage them!
– VP Sales: I’m already married.
– CEO: I quote:

“A Good Company gets ‘em once, but a Gooder Company mugs its customers again and again. A Gooder Company gets all “friendly” and “authentic” and “trustworthy” with the customers, then takes ‘em to the bank.”

– VP Marcom: Great idea! What do we call it?
– VP Sales: Sales.
– VP Marcom: No, something that the customers will love, so they feel “friendly” like the book says. Something that says we love you, you can trust us.
– CEO: Um, “Custalove?”
(Silence)
– VP Marcom: “Customer engagement”?
– CEO: Been done.
– VP Sales: “Customer Sales”?
(Silence)
– CEO: I’ve got it! Customer Intimacy! Intimacy, it means a really close loving relationship. My wife was telling me about it.
– VP Marcom (admiringly): You’re brilliant! “Intimacy” even has an entry in dictionary.com. Who knew?
– CEO (glowingly): Now we’ll get them for life. God I love this book.
– VP Sales (aside): See, I said it was about sales.