Exceptional customer experience isn’t about surveys or scores—it’s about intimacy. And that word has been making business leaders uncomfortable for decades.

Back in 1993, Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema introduced a phrase that raised more than a few eyebrows: Customer Intimacy. They first used it in the Harvard Business Review article, Customer Intimacy and Other Value Disciplines, and just two years later expanded their thinking into the book, The Discipline of Market Leaders.

Their research showed that businesses that rose to the top of their industries excelled in one or more of three areas: operational excellence, product/service leadership or customer intimacy. The real standouts managed to deliver on all three. And yet, when the book came out, “customer intimacy” quietly disappeared from the title. At the time, most CEOs thought the phrase sounded too “soft,” or too “squishy” to define their customer relationship goals.

Fast forward a few years to 2001, and Bain Fellow Fred Reichheld brought the conversation back into focus. In The Loyalty Effect and later in The Ultimate Question, he introduced the Net Promoter Score (NPS). His famous question—Would you recommend this company, this product, this service to a friend, colleague or family member?—gave companies a simple and effective way to measure the strength of their customer relationships. Responses fell into three buckets:

• Promoters – the loyal fans who spread the word.
• Passives – neutral, neither helping nor hurting.
• Detractors – unhappy voices who could actively damage your reputation.

Reichheld even tied NPS directly to gross profit, and suddenly, the race was on.

Now, here we are—more than 30 years later—and “customer intimacy” still isn’t a standard term. In fact, you’ve probably had the experience of a company trying to “coach” you through an NPS survey. Not exactly what Reichheld had in mind.

The theme of this issue of EVOLVE is “Exceptional Customer Experience.” But the reality is that customer experience isn’t about surveys or scores—it’s about creating an emotion. It’s about building the kind of trust and loyalty that makes customers feel like part of your ecosystem. That’s customer intimacy, whether we call it that or not.

In 2010, three other thought leaders, Roland Rust, Christine Moorman and Gaurav Bhalla, someone I would call a collaborator, pushed this conversation further in their article Rethinking Marketing. They argued that marketing should move away from product-focused tactics and toward a strategic, enterprise-wide focus on the customer. They envisioned a role for a Chief Customer Officer. That role later evolved into today’s CXO, or Chief Experience Officer. And in small businesses like mine—and probably yours—that role belongs to the CEO. We are the ones who must champion exceptional customer experience.

Here’s my honest observation: as a collective “we,” businesses still aren’t delivering exceptional customer experience consistently. If we want to stay ahead and truly lead our industries, markets, and communities, we need to revisit those original value disciplines: operational excellence, product leadership and, yes, customer intimacy.

Sometimes the ideas that move us forward aren’t brand new—they’re the ones that were ahead of their time. Maybe now is the moment when “customer intimacy” is no longer squishy, but essential. Maybe this is our chance to get ahead by going back to the future.