Digital Disciplines by Joe Weinman

Author:Joe Weinman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781119039877
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2015-08-24T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

The Discipline of Collective Intimacy

The discipline of collective intimacy is ultimately based on the perhaps surprising synergy between digital technologies and customer intimacy. Treacy and Wiersema said that companies pursuing customer intimacy offer “unmatched value…not in product or price, but in the extraordinary level of service, guidance, expertise, and hand-holding” that they provide to each client.1 A customer intimacy strategy entails an intimate relationship with each customer; but collective intimacy entails an intimate relationship with each customer enhanced by value-adding insights derived across all customers. To derive these insights requires applying sophisticated, processing-intensive algorithms against massive datasets acquired from customers on characteristics, preferences, behaviors, and contexts, such as genetic sequences, movie and music preferences, electric power consumption, and, well, just about anything.

The evolution to collective intimacy is happening among companies with intimacy strategies in virtually every vertical.

The private-practice physician may not exactly say, “Take two aspirin, and call me in the morning,” but, “Take this broad-spectrum antibiotic and call me in 10 days,” is not that much more advanced. It is being replaced at hospitals such as the Mayo Clinic by personalized medicine, based on data collected from all patients—ranging from lab tests to biopsies to DNA sequences—and evidence based on analysis of pharmaceutical and treatment efficacy, to better treat each patient in a unique way.

The video store with the top-rental list is mostly gone, replaced by the Netflix recommendation engine, one of the most sophisticated “computers” ever built. This engine literally processes billions of data points across tens of millions of customers to maximize your entertainment experience.

The corner bookstore's front table of best sellers and maze of aisles with shelves that may or may not have what you were looking for has been supplanted by the infinite virtual book store of Amazon.com, where the books—and other merchandise—you are most likely to purchase are clearly on display at your personal virtual front table—the home page.

A standard route from point A to point B is being replaced by an individualized one from Waze that incorporates real-time congestion, calculated from data collectively crowdsourced from other users.

The wine store clerk's recommendations—which just might possibly have been based on which wine had been overstocked or had just received promotional market development funds from the vineyard—are being replaced by computerized suggestions. Tasting Room by Lot18 uses a personalization technology it calls “WinePrint,” which generates a custom “Wine Profile” based on how you've rated wines that Tasting Room has sent you.2

Twitter's suggestions for “Who to Follow,” LinkedIn's for “People You May Know,” Match.com's “Daily Matches,” and Facebook's “Do You Know…?,” to varying degrees offer a mix of algorithms looking at the social graph—the giant web of connections recording who knows whom, collaborative and content filtering, and other secret sauce. “People You May Know,” for example, is partly based on the realization that the friend of a friend may well be a friend, too.3

The value discipline of customer intimacy remains as vital and valid as ever, but digital technologies can take it to a whole new level.

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