Our research found that 64% of organisations are underperforming when it comes to customer centricity.
And the 36% who are performing well? Their revenue is growing 9x faster year on year than their underperforming counterparts. That is an estimated yearly revenue growth of £80m if you're a £1bn company.
Our latest research explores what a customer centric organisation looks like, and how it affects every aspect of an organisation's operating model.
5 keys of customer centricity:
- De-centralise control : In our study, high performing organisations told us that their managers were focused on making sure teams were aligned to business strategy, rather than pushing ideas of how to solve customer problems themselves.
- Question everything, assume nothing : High-performing organisations avoid the opinions of managers, preferring the use of qualitative data to inform decision making – at all levels of the organisation. Qualitative data offers a visceral understanding of the customer. If quantitative data is the ‘what’, qualitative data is the ‘why’.
- Prioritise employee experience : Mature organisations provide employees with the tools, technologies, and support that make it easy for them to deliver great customer experiences. They continually focus on usability and maintainability for colleagues as well as outcomes for customers. This leads to technology choices that work well together and are easy to update.
- Adopt a customer centric org chart : It’s possible to look at an organisation's org chart and estimate how customer centric it is. Those with specialist customer researchers and product managers who bring together cross-functional teams to solve customer problems, are more likely to have high customer maturity than those where silos dominate.
- Communicate relentlessly : Improving internal communication is a low-investment strategy with a high yield. More than skills, process, governance, and facilities, our study found that highly functioning vertical and horizontal communication drove the highest performance overall.
Europe's biggest customer centricity survey :
- 8 countries : Including leaders in retail, finance, healthcare, utilities, travel and telecoms in United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Poland, South Africa
- 110 : Over 110 organisations were engaged in our personalised report and benchmarking study
- 1973 : A mix of startups and heritage organisations. Average year of founding for organisations was 1973
- 24,000 : Average organisation size was 24,000 employees, with 5% over 200,000 staff