I am reading the book The Breakthrough Company by Keith McFarland. For those familiar with the book Good to Great, the theme of this book is similar, except it focuses on smaller companies.
One of their focus companies in Intuit. The chapter I read today was discussing the period prior to the release of Quicken. At the time, Microsoft was known to be finishing Microsoft Money. They approached Intuit, and made them a low ball offer to buy the company. They then boasted that if Intuit did not sell, Microsoft Money would win the battle. Intuit won the battle using their sole advantage - intimacy with their customers. They had worked on financial products for some time, and had a good ongoing dialog with their customers. Microsoft was new to the financial software world, and has never been particularly in touch with what their customers really want.
I really like the term Customer Intimacybecause it is something we at eNable/BIZTech really work to achieve. As an example, we recently did a phone system install for a law firm. I took the time to pay attention to what they had previously (a feature-rich hosted solution that was just too expensive in the long run), and knew an in-house system would be quite different for them. As such, I made sure that we had remote access to their system, because I was sure regular changes would be needed until they got more comfortable with the different feature set. That assumption was proven correct late Friday afternoon when they requested a change to how calls were routed. As a result of anticipating their need, we were able to quickly access their system and make the change.
The IT Department of a medium company is generally pretty intimate with their users. They know for example which PCs (and users for that matter) have which quirks, and how to work around them. We will continue to strive to maintain even better intimacy with our customers.