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Organizations right now are obsessed with being “customer obsessed.” Your next meeting might have an empty chair at the table to represent the customer like at Amazon, or a leader might call for teams to stay more connected to customers.
It’s no surprise why: companies that commit to customer centricity report “two times higher revenue growth, two times higher profitability growth, and two times higher customer retention.” Despite that, “85% of businesses are not really customer-obsessed—no matter what they might claim.”
This gap rarely comes from negligence. Instead, it’s the result of organizational dynamics that pull decision-making toward internal priorities and routines and away from customer needs. The good news is that it’s not inevitable: through research and first-hand experience, NOBL has identified the key moves leaders should make to create and sustain a customer-centric organization.
What Is Customer Centricity and Customer Obsession?
At its core, customer centricity is the systematic use of customer needs and customer outcomes as the basis for decisions at every level of the organization. (If you want to get technical, “customer centricity” refers to organizational behaviors that meet the needs of customers, while “customer obsession” anticipates and exceeds those needs. It’s a question of degree, but the terms are often used interchangeably.)
A customer-centric organization:
- Clearly defines and prioritizes customers. Not all customers contribute equally to enterprise value. Effective customer-centric companies identify the customer groups most essential to future growth and design around their goals, behaviors, and constraints.
- Aligns decisions to customer outcomes. This includes strategic choices about product, pricing, service, and operations.
- Structures itself and develops processes to serve the customer, not internal needs. Most customer experiences cut across functions, so there must be governance to ensure collaboration and accountability.
Customer-centricity does not mean:
- Sending constant surveys or polls that don’t result in changes. If people believe their voice won’t matter, they’ll stop participating.
- Blindly accepting what customers say they want. A common objection to customer obsession is that “customers don’t know what they want” or “if you asked customers they’d tell you they wanted a faster horse, not a car.” Customer centricity involves studying customer behaviors and understanding needs. The organization’s job is to provide solutions.
- Completely abandoning judgement or evaluation. Yes, leaders must listen to what customers want, but they must also prioritize and make sure they’re balancing the needs of customers, employees, and the business.
Why Organizations Become Less Customer Centric Over Time
Customer centricity isn’t a “set and forget” mechanism. Even the best-intentioned organizations drift from customer realities due to:
- Information losing fidelity as it travels upward. Real, meaningful customer insights weaken as they pass through multiple organizational layers. Front-line employees understand context, exceptions, and the human factors behind customer decisions, but by the time information reaches senior leadership, it is usually aggregated into dashboards and bland summaries.
- Senior leaders becoming insulated from direct customer experience. The very nature of their roles means senior leaders spend more time in internal forums and rely on filtered information. And the more senior the role, the less direct exposure there is to real customer behavior.
- Functional specialization creating fragmented ownership. Within organizations, each function typically optimizes for their own performance, but no one owns the end-to-end customer journey.
- Success reinforcing old assumptions. When historical formulas work well, teams begin to rely on them even as customer needs shift.
- Metrics and incentives reinforcing the wrong behaviors. Performance systems often measure activities that are easy to quantify—but that doesn’t mean they matter most to customers.
How to Become a More Customer-Centric Organization
Customer centricity works best when it’s not thought of as a mindset or a cultural aspiration. It’s actually the disciplined practice of assessing customer needs, making decisions with the customer in mind, centering operations around customer needs, and reinforcing the correct behaviors.
If your organization wants to re-center customer needs, ask yourself the following to determine where to start.
Assessing Customer Needs
- Do we know who our customer is? Surprisingly, many major corporations don’t have clearly defined segmentation of who their customer is, or they’re reluctant to label “non-customers” as they don’t want to miss any opportunities for sales. Make sure everyone on the team is aligned on who you’re trying to reach, and which customer takes priority.
- Are we actively scanning for shifting sentiments and emerging needs? This may require greater investment in R&D, but start with regular sensing activities. For instance, once a quarter, ask teams to reflect on what they see changing for customers, and one or two things the team must do differently to respond.
- Are leaders directly engaging with customers? Raw customer interactions—not dashboards—improve leaders’ ability to detect emerging issues. This could look like setting aside 10 minus in weekly meetings to review a customer case, or visiting a store once a quarter.
Customer-Centered Decision Making
- Are leaders making decisions with the customer in mind? Requiring teams to document customer impact in decision proposals can increase clarity and alignment. Before making any decisions, leaders should know:
- What customer the decision it will impact
- What outcomes they value
- How the decision will impact those outcomes, and
- What evidence supports the assessment
- Can we push decision-making closer to the customer? Teams that have greater interaction with the customer have a better understanding of what customers want, and should be empowered to act on those needs as much as possible. Of course, this means leaders have to be comfortable making fewer decisions.
Centering Customer Needs in Operation
- Have we determined who’s accountable for the customer experience? Naming a single senior leader as the owner of a journey improves coordination and reduces cross-functional friction. If this sounds overwhelming, start with just one customer journey or part of the journey with a clear business impact, such as onboarding or renewal.
- Can we create a cross-functional team to solve a specific customer problem? Identify one customer problem that spans functions and create a short-term team representing product, operations, and customer-facing roles. Give the team a narrow scope, a short timeline, and direct access to a journey owner or executive sponsor so they can speed up delivery.
Reinforcing Customer-Centric Behaviors
- Are we measuring the right things? Outcome metrics—like time to resolution, onboarding completion, repeat usage, or segment-level retention—better predict value creation and strengthen cross-functional alignment. Start by defining one outcome metric for each critical function and using it in executive reviews.
- Have we set up systems and processes to increase information sharing? Make sure you’ve set up tools and rituals so that everyone is aware of changes and that you’re not missing something in translation, duplicating efforts, or working against each other.
The Best Partner for Becoming Customer Centric
As the above recommendations show, the path back to the customer doesn’t require dramatic reorganization or massive investment. It does require a disciplined commitment to small, consistent practices that anchor the organization in the needs of the customer.
If you’re looking for a partner with experience to get your organization on the right track, NOBL is the best consultancy for not just assessing but actually implementing new behaviors to become a more customer-centric organization. Learn more about how we support leaders or contact us.
