How Enterprise Brands Build Customer Centricity

How Did We Get Here? Why Companies Default to Product-Centric Journeys

Most companies say they’re customer-centric. Their customers (and org charts) say otherwise. That’s not a dig. It’s just a reality for a lot of big businesses.

More than half of consumers today (58%) feel that companies trying to sell them products don’t understand what they need or want.

Product centricity is a natural byproduct of scaling a business. Growing firms tend to focus on targets like profit, product sales, share price, or leads in the pipeline. Systems form around those goals. Product-driven processes and reporting lines solidify.

Customer centricity ultimately becomes an afterthought. Either because people assume that customer needs are grandfathered in, or there’s just too much work piling up to stop and think about what customers really want. Let alone how to reach across departmental siloes to meet those needs.

Why Customer Centricity Matters

It’s fair to say that understanding who customers really are and what they really need is hard. At least, it’s harder than scheduling marketing campaigns around what the business wants to sell. Managing unpredictable experiences is harder than planning seasonal campaigns.

However, these ideas shouldn’t be allowed to direct decision-making. Organisations need to get comfortable with challenging decisions that don’t prioritise customer needs. 

Customer satisfaction drives business growth. And satisfying customers depends on knowing what they need. 

• 62% of “customer-obsessed” companies saw higher margins (SAP Emarsys, 2022). 
• They also reported 41% faster revenue growth and 51% higher retention than non-customer-obsessed organisations (Forrester, 2024). 
• Loyal customers are 64% more likely to buy frequently and 31% more likely to pay a premium (McKinsey, 2022).

Read more: Why is Customer Intelligence Important?

Side Note: Vertical vs Organisation-Wide Customer Centricity

Imagine you work for a bank in the loans team. Rates are attractive (and profitable), so the bank aims to sell more loans. You build your models, find customers with good credit who look like they might benefit from a loan, and target them through your CRM.

Unfortunately, the mortgage team has done the same. So has the credit card team. All the marketing is personalised. Each team is technically doing a decent job. But nobody is coordinating marketing efforts or sharing customer intelligence, so the customer gets three completely disjointed sets of marketing from the same brand for similar products.

We see this same scenario play out with telcos, car brands, fitness franchises, media orgs – you name it. Personalising within a product line is a step forward. But real customer centricity connects experiences across the full lifecycle. Teams align around what the customer needs, not just what the business is selling.

It’s the difference between personalised selling and curated, customer-led experiences.

Why Fix Something That Isn’t Broken?

“Our current model works. We’re profitable. Why change it?”

We hear this often. The answer is because customer expectations have changed.

Recent Salesforce data shows that 79% of customers expect consistent interactions across departments. But 55% say it usually feels like they’re talking to separate departments. Even worse, 56% say they often need to repeat themselves when they switch channels or reps.

These disconnected experiences erode trust and loyalty. Eventually, customers feel like they may as well take their business elsewhere. (A reasonable response if you ask us.)

Brands that get customer centricity right have a lot to gain. Customer loyalty is what separates successful brands from the rest of the crowd.

The way to earn it is to demonstrate that you’re listening by building journeys around customer needs.

Why Customer-Centric Targets Matter

Businesses exist to make money. Customers are the ones providing that money. The longer a customer remains loyal, the more money they’ll provide, often without the business incurring proportional costs.

Keeping customers happy is good for business. That should be the prime directive of anyone working in customer experience management (CXM).

Once a business loses sight of that and only makes product-centric decisions, it’ll see satisfaction and then loyalty fall like dominoes. So begins a familiar cycle of building new campaigns and chasing new business. Meanwhile, churn rates climb.

That outlook might sound clinical, but it’s not intended to. No operation lasts long without “customers”. That’s true whether it’s a charity seeking donations, a multinational selling millions of widgets, or a B2B enterprise with a few dozen key contracts.

Where We Need to Go: Evolving from Product-Led Campaigns to Customer-Led Journeys

From our point of view, customer centricity means making decisions based on what’s best for customers. In the context of customer experience management (CXM), that means setting up team structures, workflows, tech automations, and data structures so that journeys form around customer needs, not campaign targets.

Customer value is the goal. Product sales (or email engagement, website visits, app downloads, etc.) should be a lens to understand customer needs and behaviours, but not the focus KPI.

The First Step is Knowing Your Customers

You need to know who’s at the receiving end of these decisions. In other words, you need to know your customers. Who they are, what they want, and how meeting their needs benefits your business.

Customer intelligence holds the answer to all those questions. We outlined a blueprint for strong customer intelligence in an earlier guide, but it boils down to this:

1. Know who they are: Having a system to gather relevant customer data and make it accessible across the organisation.
2. Understand what they want: Analysing performance through different lenses to ascertain how you can drive value by meeting customer needs better.
3. Care about the outcomes: Moving from operational metrics to customer-centric KPIs so that you can set targets that actually impact business goals.

Read more: Why is Customer Intelligence Important?

How Enterprise Organisations Evolve To Become Customer Centric

Product-centric CXM stems from a lack of coordination across data, people, processes, and tech. You can’t evolve unless all the parts are in sync. Thankfully, this is almost always solvable without tearing everything down and starting over.

Data

We say it often: Good data is the foundation of good decisions. At the centre of all this is a clear, up-to-date view of the customer as an individual. You can’t engage the individual unless you can see them and how your efforts affect them.

As businesses grow, customer data tends to sprawl and silo. Bringing it back together takes effort. But once it’s clean and centralised, you’re off and running.

• Audit existing databases, repositories, streams, and activation channels to map where customer data comes in and how it’s used.
• Define the data you need and ditch the rest.
• Establish a shared customer intelligence platform like a CDP, CRM, or bespoke database.
• Collect relevant and valuable data, not just whatever’s available.
• Focus on first-party data.
• Create a data management policy to uphold compliance and hygiene.

Structure

Traditional team structures rarely reflect customer needs. Rethink how people work together so that things get done and customers benefit.

If your organisation evolved with a traditional (vertical, product-centric) structure, it’ll take some work to create an organisational chart that follows the customer lifecycle rather than product roadmaps. This is often the trickiest part of customer-centric change management. Yet it’s arguably the most important.

Here are some ways we’ve reworked organisational structures for customer centricity:

• Established cross-functional squads to bridge siloes between previously product- or channel-based teams
• Set new goals and KPIs to focus the squads’ efforts on delivering the best experiences for customers.
• Repositioned line managers as ‘servant leaders’ tasked with enabling their team to deliver better experiences, rather than relaying orders to drive product performance.
• Developed CXM best-practice playbooks, campaign templates, and asset libraries to make work more customer-centric (with an added efficiency boost)

“Job losses and title changes are a bogeyman. Disruption occurs when people who are used to working a certain way don’t understand the reasons for new reporting lines – that is, the benefits of customer centricity.”

Mark Clydesdale, Head of Strategic Consulting

Process

Since customer satisfaction is the desired outcome, daily decision-making needs to drive in that direction.

Cultural change takes a while to embed. People still need to get on with work in the meantime. For the transition to feel natural, find ways to fit customer centricity within a rhythm they’re used to.

• Establish customer performance-based KPIs that are trackable and make sure they’re visible alongside the sales or product-based metrics people are used to tracking.
• Use product performance or category sales figures as a lens to analyse customer outcomes, shifting the mindset to customer performance.
• Embed a long-term “what does this mean for the customer?” question into decision-making to catch knee-jerk reactions.
• Encourage customer advocates to speak up if they spot a short-sighted decision with negative impacts on long-term customer satisfaction or profitability.
• Leaders set the strategic priorities, but then empower teams (the people with detailed customer knowledge) to decide how they’ll deliver through a customer-centric approach.

These process tweaks have the added benefit of contextualising operational decisions. That’s a catalyst for collaboration, and it helps people understand why things are changing.

Tech

You probably have all the tools you need to start delivering customer-centric experiences. Work on integrating existing platforms before introducing new tech.

Unfortunately, tech vendors have misled too many companies into thinking that the latest martech tool will solve age-old customer centricity issues. It won’t. Real customer centricity is only possible when process, people, data, and tech work together.

Tech’s role is to enable:

• Automation.
• Collaboration.
• Communication.
• Scale.

In an ideal world, cross-departmental teams share a tightly curated suite of CXM tools. That’s rarely reality. Different teams need specialist tools. What works for the website team doesn’t suit the social media manager.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with a hodgepodge tech stack, with three caveats:

1. It shouldn’t create internal competition or siloes.
2. Tools should be as integrated as possible.
3. A shared customer intelligence foundation is essential.

The Best Thing You Can Do Is Start

Customer centricity is not a hard reset. You almost certainly have useful pieces already. You just need a better way to fit them together. Retraining the organisation’s muscle memory takes time and effort, but the gains are well worth it.

“Customer centricity is one of those things that sounds simple but is actually pretty complicated to put into practice. For starters, you need a decent amount of detailed and relevant customer data. Then the whole entity needs to work together towards goals that might not immediately resonate with their daily tasks. Communication, clarity, and consistency are so important throughout the process.” 

Mark Clydesdale, Head of Strategic Consulting

The trickiest bit about customer centricity is coordinating all the moving parts. By rethinking how your organisation is structured, how your teams collaborate, and what your journeys are actually trying to achieve, you can steer the company towards customer centricity.

None of this happens overnight. But it is possible if the organisation as a whole commits to letting customers lead. We’ve seen turnarounds in global companies with deeply embedded ways of working.

Start small and targeted. Set goals for the organisation. Prepare for most of the work to happen in process and change management. And for the love of all that’s holy, don’t try to take shortcuts with technology. You’ll just end up throwing good money after bad.

For a further breakdown of “Things You Can Start Doing Right Now’, download our Customer Journey Playbook (below) and then head straight to the section on Understanding Your Customers.