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Customer Intimacy, Meet Operational Excellence

Harvard Business Review

What is more important to company success, a strong external focus on customer experiences or an internal focus on effective and efficient operations? Bean have had lots of information about customers for many years that they have used to tailor offerings and services. As a direct marketer we have been good at customer intimacy.

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Operational Excellence, Meet Customer Intimacy

Harvard Business Review

Most organizations continuously strive to achieve operational excellence, but they spend less effort understanding customer needs — and few marry these two sources of customer value effectively. In 1996 Tesco adopted Toyota Production System approaches to take its supply chain operations to an even higher level.

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IBM at 100: How to Outlast Depression, War, and Competition

Harvard Business Review

Newly appointed CEO Lou Gerstner logged thousands of hours visiting customers, industry experts and analysts. He then set about transforming the company to rekindle IBM's historic commitment to customer intimacy, to make the organization much more integrated, and to streamline operations.

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Understanding Customers Is Everyone's Job

Harvard Business Review

Creating products and services for market segments of one (" mass customization ") isn''t easy. The only way it can happen: marketing, IT, operations, and human resources functions must collaborate in unprecedented ways. It means building a profile of each customer, based on transaction and social media data (e.g.,

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Start-ups: Before You Launch Your Product, Start With a Service

Harvard Business Review

Seed investors are mostly operating as growth investors, expecting that the entrepreneur will somehow manage to bridge the gap and bring a concept to realization. Through these kinds of dialogues, entrepreneurs diagnose real pain-points in customers, and end up building products that customers are willing to pay for.

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What Apple, Lending Club, and AirBnB Know About Collaborating with Customers

Harvard Business Review

Improved customer insight : The increased customer intimacy that comes with co-creation deepens your understanding of your market, enabling you to serve it better. When customers co-create and have a vested interest in its success, they are more willing to share personal data and other assets with it.

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