Customer-centricity. Is this just another buzzword or something that actually moves the needle for your company? 

Add to this endless to-do lists, departments with their own priorities, and bosses ordering you to switch focus on their ‘new big idea’... When are you supposed to find the time to turn up to people’s desks and start convincing them about the benefits of customer-centricity?

And you’re not just adding more to their plate. You also need to add new ways of working—ways that may conflict with their priorities and how they like to work. 

How do you convince different teams with little motivation to focus more on your customers? I spoke to six customer-focused leaders from various brands to see how they got people in their companies to care.

Here are their top recommendations.

Understanding Customer-centricity

Understanding customer-centricity isn’t hard. It’s based on two ingredients:

1. Listen to your customers (through interviews, surveys, live chat)
2. Act on that (through new products, innovations, or better offerings)

It’s all about getting customer feedback, iterating your offer/service/products based on that, rinse, and repeat.

Why Businesses Struggle with Customer-centricity

Most businesses struggle with customer-centricity because there’s no culture of customer-centricity. So, leadership gives empty talks about a buzzword the rest of the company ignores. 

This is a chicken and egg situation. You need to collect user feedback and act on it. This requires tools, money, and employees. You won’t get any if you don’t have leadership buy-in (culture). 

One way to solve this is to start small. Run the research you can (check the live chat and reviews), collect the data, pull insights, and show what you want to do based on customer feedback to your leadership. If they approve, you’ll get small buy-in once KPIs start rolling in.

The Power of Data in Customer-centricity

Customer-centricity is based on data from gathered customer feedback. This can come from different kinds of research like live chat analysis, sales team interviews, customer review analysis, and call centre data.

But the key part is that data lets you convince leadership about needed changes in products or offerings. It’s easier to ignore hunches from product managers than raw customer feedback picked from reviews or websites.

Challenge opinions

Marty Hayes, Online Business Manager for UK Consumers at Dell Technologies, uses data to show people why customer centricity is important and to get people to start questioning opinions: 

I once worked for an online womenswear retailer, where our target market was fast-fashion-craving teenage girls and young women. The CEO, a 40-something man, thought he knew what was best in terms of creative, copy, user experience, and value proposition.

Once he saw videos from What Users Do of real customers trying to use the site, pointing out where things didn’t quite resonate or sounded contrived, and shared suggestions for improvements, the penny started to drop that he wasn’t our customer, and that they probably knew best.

Show the financial impact 

Sometimes, showing what the customers said directly in front of leadership won’t produce a lot of results (buy-in). This is your chance to show the revenue impact behind improved customer experience. 

For instance, you can visualize and connect CX metrics with revenue and deeper business impact via goal tree map workshops. You can also calculate the ROI behind your tests even during pre-test analysis with a test-bandwidth calculator.

Hayes explained how to persuade the C-suite when data alone isn’t enough: 

If you can’t win the argument on data alone, I’ve found that modeling an improved conversion rate based on incremental customer experience improvements can get the wheels in motion. Money talks, and if you can show that, by improving the customer experience, it might lead to a 1% increase in conversion, and that could lead to $XXXX more revenue per year, that can help put things into context.

Share data or insights company-wide

Since every team impacts user experience, you need ensure all of them hear about customer-centric wins. As Chang Chen, Head of Growth & Marketing at Otter.ai explained: 

Everything any team does will have an impact on the user experience, from back-end engineers to customer success specialists. Enabling our teams to hear directly from the customer, to gain insights on how our product is impacting their work and life, is the key to aligning the teams. We record, transcribe, and summarize all our customer interviews and share every single one of them.

But there’s a downside to giving everyone access to customer data, something Dan Moross, Customer Experience Director at Moo, found:

Some people will be looking at only one data point. And it doesn't mean anything unless you can join it with all the other data. It’s always been a bit of a challenge—people making assumptions based on very little information.

Chen offered a common example:

The customers we talk to might not be representative of our target customers. If we focus too much on one customer's feedback, we might be sidetracked and might not drive a better user experience for the majority of our customers. We need to collect enough feedback and focus on the customers in our targeted segments, as well as combining the quantitative data with the qualitative data to validate the learnings.

To avoid these situations, you could produce insight reports for teams, analyzing the data and triangulating findings to ensure the data isn’t misinterpreted. Putting the findings into a context that different teams understand can help.

For example, rather than just giving the ecommerce team data on searches that return no results on the site, Hayes presented his findings in this context: 

If a customer searches for a product that they don’t stock, they’ll likely reach a “no results found” page. Imagine that replicated as a real-world experience–a potential customer walks into your shop and asks the sales assistant if you sell XYZ, and the member of staff just says “nope” and walks off. I don’t think that customers would stay in the shop very long. Relating it to the in-store experience seems to really work in terms of highlighting issues and opportunities for improvement.

2. Help teams experiment 

Experimentation is key to improving customer experiences. Encourage teams to test small ideas in controlled environments before scaling. For instance, trialing new product features with a subset of customers can reveal valuable insights without risking a major overhaul.

Some new ideas or initiatives can be costly but result in big payoffs. Others can actually make things worse for your customers and harm revenue. Unless you’re providing teams a scientific way to test these ideas, you won't know which is which. 

Moross talked about how he came to this conclusion at Moo: 

Something I learned a lot from joining with the design team is you shouldn't just build a thing that takes you a year and put it out and hope it's going to work. You should do something over a course of a month to a subset of customers, and then tweak it and iterate it.

So how can you help your teams manage the risk of implementing new ideas? 

Create a center of excellence 

A Center of Excellence (CoE) can serve as the hub of customer-focused initiatives, where a dedicated team oversees experimentation, research, and cross-functional collaboration. This team can help others within the business test and refine customer-focused ideas, fostering a culture where innovation thrives.

Rather than employing experts in customer research, UX, psychology, testing, optimisation, and data analytics into every team across the business, you can create a “center of excellence” (CoE)—one expert team that works across the business, either performing the experimentation tasks for other teams or running education programmes to help upskill others to experiment. 

Sometimes, this function has an expiration date—once other teams are upskilled, the CoE disbands. In other cases, it’s a permanent fixture and a source of innovation. They’re usually put in place to help govern the overall approach to customer-centricity and experimentation, setting working practices across teams (e.g., agile methodologies, aligning tools stacks).

Another important role of the CoE is helping with change management—communicating the CX work and results while also facilitating discussions across teams (when you still have functional teams) to get people working together on customer-centric improvements. 

Our client Laura Borghesi, Senior Director of Growth Marketing at MongoDB, talked to us about how she created a CoE. At MongoDB, the growth team is divided into different parts of the user journey (e.g., acquisition, conversion, onboarding, activation, etc.).

The CoE team is a layer that cuts across all growth teams. It’s not the job of the CoE team to own any part of the user experience but to enable other teams to run experiments in their areas. 

At the beginning, Borghesi explained, a CoE team is likely to be more involved in actually running experiments for other teams. But down the line, their role is more about helping others run their own experiments. The CoE team then oversees the integrity of experiments being run across the company—ensuring that individual teams’ work fits into the overarching roadmap and that experiments are set up in different swim lanes.

The CoE team also helps with change management by getting everyone involved and excited about improving the CX. She said they hold bets on which experiment treatments will win when tested—something that everyone enjoys that also embeds a culture of customer centricity. 

3. Get CCOs to represent 

Whether it’s a Chief Customer Officer or Customer Experience Officer, to be successful in customer-centricity you need someone at the top who’s got the customers’ best interests at heart.

Grassroot changes can happen bottom up, but having a CCO who can influence people across the business—and has direct access to the CEO—will increase company-wide buy-in. McKinsey illustrates how this works in practice (and what you need if you don’t have a CCO in place):

4. Tweak your company structure 

I can run as many workshops as I like to try and get people to be connected to the customer. And they might score high on “being customer-centric.” But if you don't have the right systems in place, and you don't have the right ways of working, then it’s just lip service.

Dan Moross of Moo

Most of us work in teams organized around functions. Different departments have clear boundaries of what they work on. This functional-based structure means your teams are responsible only for small sections of the overall customer journey, meaning that they have to negotiate with and influence other departments to make holistic improvements.

While this functional structure might make sense internally, it can fail to produce a great, cohesive customer experience. One approach to tackle this is cross-functional teams organized around the customer (journeys or segments). 

Tom Carrington Smith, Co-founder of CharlieHR, wrote about the issues he faced with functional teams that lead them to restructure the business: 

We have the company set up in the obvious way. Four teams each focused on their role disciplines; product design, engineering, customer experience, and growth [. . . ] We found that everyone needed a touchpoint with everyone else at some point to hit their objective.

This was slowing us down, as it relied on a huge volume of communication (resulting in a lot of miscommunication) across the company [. . .] When we drilled down further into how departments were working together, we found that teams were often compromising their own objectives to fulfill other departments’ objectives.

This was building a feeling of scarcity, and the frustration levels were mounting.

But then he had the following conversation:

So he set about creating new cross-functional teams that looked more like this:

Simon Harrow, Chief Customer Officer at iG04, shared with me how they restructured their teams—and the benefit he’s seen since then: 

Our solution was to formally bring together all the functions that customers would interact with. This created accountability for the customer experience across the functions and removed conflicting priorities when looking at operating models and the technology underpinning our capability.

This moves any issues from being within a company function to being centered on the customer. It also allows us to understand the impact of the problem across functions—where we can then prioritize activities and shape roadmaps with a holistic view of the customer impact.

Should you restructure to cross-functional teams?

Thirty percent of Fortune 500 firms already organize themselves around customer groups in cross-functional teams. But a reorg of your business functions isn’t right for everyone. A study quoted in the Harvard Business Review found that: 

• 69% of businesses structured around their customers, which operated in highly competitive markets had lower performance compared to their product-centric peers.
• Businesses that reorganized to be customer-focused who were operating in low-profitability industries (where customers don’t particularly value customization or responsiveness), performed 20% lower than companies whose structures were not aligned with customers.

So, a reorganization isn’t for everyone. It’s a big commitment that can take up to three years before you reap dividends. But in the right markets and for the right businesses, this approach can provide a real competitive advantage. 

McKinsey found that companies focused on customer journeys had a 50% wider gap in customer satisfaction than those that focused on touchpoints. Customer-focused structures can give businesses a distinct competitive advantage.

Moving toward cross-functional teams 

To restructure your organization, you’ll need buy-in from your senior management team. Having that CCO advocate will help. 

Still, as the adage goes, Rome wasn’t built in a day. And neither will your new customer-focused structure. For many businesses, changes happen in a stepwise, sometimes organic way over a few years, as was the case for Moross at Moo.

A way to curry favor with the C-suite for your cross-functional dreams is to show what’s possible when teams align. Dell’s Hayes offered a great example with site search reports, which can give you insights into trends, what people think you should sell, naming conventions, customer service pain points, misspellings etc. These insights could impact the product, digital experience, store locations, merchandisers, marketing, and customer service teams. 

But if you give that same information to each functional team, the way they plan improvements and prioritise may differ—leading to a confusing, disjointed experience for the customer. A cross-functional team means that insights from customer data are actioned consistently across the experience.

How do you set up a cross-functional, customer-focused team? 

Not every team in the company needs to be organized as a cross-functional team. Some may follow “channel and delivery” units (e.g., retail stores). Some disciplines will remain as functionally structured teams or “flow to work” groups, such as corporate support activities like HR.

Then you have the more fluid cross-functional teams, which can be organized around certain customer journeys or customer segments. There are a few key elements needed to create successful cross-functional teams:

Autonomy 

Your team needs to have all the skills to work on the end-to-end journey (e.g., engineering, product, marketing, etc). But don’t make your teams too big—after a certain point they become ineffective. Use Jeff Bezos’ “two-pizza rule”: If you need more than two pizzas to feed everyone on your team, your team is too big. 

Be accountable to KPIs 

Set KPIs and reward teams for achieving them—and let them decide how to achieve them. Nordstrom’s famous employee handbook has one rule: “Use your best judgment in all situations. There will be no additional rules.”

Their employees know that customer satisfaction is the main KPI, and this “handbook” helps reinforce their accountability. The expectation from the business is that they will act as they see fit to achieve their goals. 

Here’s an example of how Nilan Peiris, the VP of Growth at Transferwise, is setting up teams to be accountable:

Our performance marketing team (the team responsible for advertising on Facebook and Google) has a product manager and developers working within it [. . .] The performance marketing team can make changes to any part of the product that they believe will improve conversion from performance.

This focus on our customers and our KPIs gives us incredible focus and stops us from prioritizing abstract notions that do not matter, but the things that will make a difference to our customers. We have no roadmap meetings, no strategy sessions, our KPIs and teams give us clarity on where we should focus.

As we’ve got KPI ownership rather than product/code ownership, this works. Teams can work across the entire experience to move their KPIs.

This sounds great in theory, but when a team has 50 things they could do to improve their KPIs, which do they do first? If your cross-functional teams aren’t permanent and go back to their functional departments, they’re likely to prioritize elements that benefit their “home team.” 

A practical way to help teams prioritise is by using even-over statements. Pick one good thing that should take priority, even over another good thing (typically in conflict with one another). 

For example, customer satisfaction even over revenue, or security even over UX. Get your team to vote on their top three, with each person getting three votes. This helps the team set their priorities. 

James Robinson, Head of Conversion Rate Optimisation at Sofology, shares how setting priorities achieves the best outcome:  

I've proposed a whole raft of improvements to a customer account area in the past. Backed with good data and research, expecting it to be picked up almost immediately given the case.

Then, I found out that the systems that it sat on were old and unsupported, and there was a risk they could stop functioning at some point. The “customer-centric” priority was to do the work behind the scenes—failure would have been much worse than waiting a few more months for the improvements.

Give authority to make decisions 

It’s easy for teams to fall into the trap of consensus. As humans, we generally avoid conflict and are mostly happy to go along with the flow. However, this approach doesn’t always lead you to do the right things. 

Therefore, early on, it’s important to set out the who and how for team decisions. Priorities and KPIs help, but who has the ultimate say? 

At the very start of team formation, determine who has what decision-making power. When is someone required to get additional people involved? When shouldn’t decisions be made in isolation? When are multiple perspectives needed?

Below illustrates how this might look in reality: 

Delegating the decision-making power within the team means they’re more likely to listen to customer rather than internal stakeholders wants, as Peiris explains:

Our teams are autonomous and independent [. . .] no one can tell a team what to do. For example, we have a currencies team. It decides each quarter which currencies it's going to launch. No one tells the team what currencies to launch. Anyone can challenge the team on what it's doing, and the team should have a rationale for explaining why it’s focussing where it is. What this means in practice isn’t anarchy—but empowering teams to listen to customers and not to “someone high up.

Conclusion

Getting everyone to care about customers can feel like a hard slog, but once people across the business start along this path—and the structure and behaviours are established—they’ll be no turning back.

The benefits to the customer and business can set your business apart, and you can finally challenge anyone who wants to do something based on a hunch, rather than what’s actually best for your customers.

Speero proved to a client the value of customer-centricity and helped the brand get acquired for $100 million in the process. We helped Native Deodorant set up tracking and run user research, which let us find issues their team wasn’t aware of for years.

One key finding was that Native customers didn’t know about upsells and cross-sells. Speero tested placing cross-sells and drove $1.5 million in ARR from a single winning test that drew buyers’ attention to cross-sells.

We also increased the checkout conversion rate by 9% overall and contributed toward mega growth, which saw Native raking $1 million MRR. At that moment, after one year of being partners with Speero, Native got acquired by Procter & Gamble for $100 million.

FAQ

What are the first steps in building a customer-centric company?

The first thing you need is actually the motivation or goodwill to listen to the customers (customer-centricity) and solve their problems. This needs tools and time. This means you need to get management buy-in to invest and start building a culture of customer-centricity. So, you’ll need:

1. To run customer research
2. People working together to solve customer problems
3. Experimenting with best solutions

All three should be connected through a strategy that lets you measure impact over time. At Speero, we call this a ‘Listening Strategy’. The Listening Strategy is one of our building blocks that facilitates experimentation, generating insights from research and testing, and creating an operating system accessible across all teams.

How can small businesses implement customer-centric strategies?

Even if you’re a small company, you can leverage customer feedback and data to improve vital KPIs. Start by listening to what your customers are saying:

1. Run surveys. 
2. Analyze reviews 
3. Look at social media. 

Use information from all three to refine your services or products.  “Customer-centricity starts with listening to customers”. The message may be cliche, but cliches often have a grain of truth. 

The point is that you can find customer insights in any business size. These insights are an excellent starting point for small businesses implementing customer-centric strategies. Some of their examples are:

1. Live chat data
2. Call centre analysis
3. Sales team interviews

Understand what questions your website users have in their heads. Why are people calling your call centre? This lets you identify key pain points, barriers, and areas of opportunity. 

Even if you’re a small business, you need to regular talk to your customers (through research methods). Run:

1. Surveys
2. Usability studies
3. Polls
4. Interviews

All of them are powerful ways to help you understand what actually matters to your customers: their fears, uncertainties, motivations, and doubts.

What role does customer feedback play in customer-centricity?

Customer feedback is the core of customer-centricity. You can’t be customer-centric unless you’re listening to your customers' needs and expectations. 

Customer feedback lets you tailor your offer to what your users need:

1. Identify opportunities for new products and services.
2. Improve their current offering
3. Identify opportunities to innovate

You’ll also improve brand loyalty once customers see how you incorporated their feedback. 

How can leadership drive a culture of customer care?

Lead by example: especially by investing in needed tools and people. You or your leadership should also be seen listening to and acting on customer feedback by other employees. 

This sends a clear message: You actually care about customer feedback. In turn, this can cause a knock-on effect of driving the customer-centricity culture deeper into the company. 

What are the common pitfalls of customer-centric initiatives?

Sometimes, customer centricity is more a buzzword than actual practice. We've seen companies talking about putting the customer first, but in reality, it's just a marketing and branding game as they are not prepared to take short-term profit loss over long-term gain. 

Another common pitfall in customer-centric initiatives is a lack of action. The listening strategy alone is not good enough. This does not make a business customer-centric. What makes a business customer-centric is the action(s) that come from the listening strategy.

Customer care, research, experimentation, product, and other teams also need to work together. If siloes are present then it's very hard to solve customer problems.