In a customer-oriented enterprise, business processes must be viewed from the perspective of the customer. You have successfully satisfied the customer's request when the customer says he or she is satisfied. Your business processes may need to be re-engineered around the customer's perspective of success. Most business processes cross functional lines, but, from the customer’s perspective, the process is a single, continuous activity. Procedures need to be developed with the customer’s perspective in mind. The customer knows nothing about how you’ve organized your various experts into functional areas. Sure, the sales activities requires a different expertise than providing technical support, but all these people need to work in harmony so that the customer views an integrated organization. As Janey Frazier and Gail McKenzie state "a customer can have a wonderful ordering experience, but if defective merchandise is delivered, the customer will not be pleased with her experience". Likewise, if your business procedure force the customer to be the integrator between your functional areas by requiring the him to call different numbers based on the type of problem being addressed, then you probably will not be perceived as being very intimate by that customer.

Your business processes must be examined from an "end to end" perspective that starts when the customer makes a request of the enterprise and completes when the request is completed to the customer's satisfaction. Consequently, to be customer-focused, your business processes must be integrated across the business functions that are performed to complete the customer's request.

Your IT organization can deliver the best, most customer-centric applications available, but if the business processes that support the customer-facing activities are still account-oriented, the promises of customer intimacy will not be achieved. In many organizations, customer service representatives (CSR) are primarily order takers who expect the customer to know what she wants. CSRs are usually rewarded on time-based quotas, such as number of telephone calls processed per hour or number of service calls made per day. Consequently, the staff is implicitly encouraged to complete each transaction as fast as possible, with the least amount of paperwork possible. Anyone who attends data warehouse conferences has heard the story about the insurance company that had a high percentage of broken leg claims. When they researched why this phenomena was occurring, they determined that the US was not in the grips of some epidemic that caused people to fall down a lot. Instead, "broken leg" was the default for the claim type field on the data entry screen. The claim type field was not used directly by the claims processing system, therefore the claim was accepted with this incorrect data. However, the downstream processes that analyzed claims based on this data were producing incorrect results.

This myopic viewpoint from many operational areas in not unusual. One manager even stated that his branch was responsible for getting accounts established as quickly as possible and he didn’t want to waste his time on "that marketing data". Another company had several units whose sole responsibility was to correct the orders that got past the initial data entry, only to fail when more stringent edits were applied later in the fulfillment life cycle.

Customer intimacy requires that the customer-servicing staff have the information they need readily available to satisfy their customer’s requests. Furthermore, they must be empowered by management to assess each situation individually and determine the best course of action to resolve any anomalies that may arise. One financial service organization exemplifies this philosophy in its guidelines for handling ATM misdispenses. The CSR taking the complaint uses her own discretion to determine whether to provide the customer with an immediate account credit to cover the disputed amount (up to a preset limit) or to log an investigation that would be forwarded to the appropriate research unit. This customer-oriented policy strengthens the customer’s goodwill towards the bank in what can be an adversarial interaction.

Customer intimacy demands that the quality of the customer care provided is equally rewarded as the quantity of customers serviced.