Customer Centricity Is What You Build, Not What You Say
What do companies mean when they say “customer-centric?” Lots of businesses say it… and they say it a lot. A review of the annual reports of 350 firms found references to being customer-centric, on average, on every third page.
Subjectively, does it feel like most of the companies you deal with put you at the center? I’d guess not. If you could dig your way into their metaphorical center, what would you find? Perhaps the share price, or the CEO’s ego, or some unrealized Platonic product vision from the founder’s head.
There’s something in the center of every business, but it’s mostly hidden away from anyone on the outside (and often from staff on the inside too). In that way, it’s a bit like our galaxy. We thought for a while our little planet was in the middle with the sun orbiting around us. Then it turned out we were orbiting the sun. And now we know that we’re all in orbit around Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole in the middle of the Milky Way.
We learn about black holes not directly but by studying the effect they have on the things that orbit around them. And in the same way, if you want to understand what’s in the middle of a company, you need to look at their actions, their impact on the world. How do they treat their customers and their staff? How do they spend their money?
In a 2026 study, executives were asked to rate their own firm’s customer-centricity on an A to F scale. On average they gave scores of B−/C+, with larger companies even worse at C, which suggests that the ultimate customer experience dealing with those companies probably isn’t fantastic.
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Why companies become less customer-centric as they grow
When a company is just a handful of people, every customer is critical, and every person in the company can know what they want, what they need, and how to best serve them. Without those first few customers, there is no business at all, so they occupy the center of every mind.
As a company grows, there is a natural drift away. There are more customers, so knowing any particular one isn’t as vital, and there are more specialized roles within the company that don’t necessarily interact with customers every day. With more jobs to be done and more priorities to balance, it’s easy for the gravitational center to shift away from the customer without anyone intending it.
In that same customer-centricity study mentioned above, the authors identified three primary risks to customer-centric businesses, all driven by the time when “management’s focus gradually shifts toward exploitation, simplification, and efficiency”:
Product focalization: Accidentally becoming focused on making a “better product” above even serving customer needs.
Rigid organizational boundaries: Optimizing systems for efficiency until there’s no room for anything but a transactional relationship with customers.
A fixed-pie mindset: Assuming that the only way for the business to make more is to ensure the customer gets less.
None of these are inevitable outcomes of growth, but they are often the path of least resistance in a growing company. There are other paths to tread, if you know the way.
Action item: Think about the last big decision your company made. If you asked a customer about the outcome, would they see it as being customer-centric? Why?
Building structures to strengthen customer-centricity
Well-intentioned, skilled customer support staff can be helpful and empathetic, but they are the outcome of a business built to be customer-centric, not the creator of it. Small companies can be customer-centric by choice because there are only a few people who make decisions.
As they grow, companies need to be structured in a way that makes customer-centric actions their default so that one bad quarter and a rough board meeting can’t change the company’s center.
One example is Costco. In Zeynep Ton’s research, she found that Costco’s decision to sell fewer product lines allowed their stores to be cheaper and faster to stock, requiring fewer floor staff, and that allowed each staff member to be paid more than their competitors could pay and to be cross-trained for a higher percentage of tasks within the store.
Their ability to deliver good service is built on that operational decision to simplify their offerings. Ton’s Good Jobs Strategy explores how those better customer service jobs directly contribute to higher-quality service and increased profits.
Consider also Vanguard, a funds management company which is structured so that it is owned by the member funds, meaning there is no incentive to charge higher fees. The business structure reinforces the customer-centric approach.
Companies that remain customer-centric have created systems that produce customer-centric behaviors through their normal operation instead of relying on individual effort from leaders or frontline staff. Having a leader who believes in great service is fantastic… until one day they aren’t there anymore. Systems last longer than people.
Action item: Ask your support team to identify a decision they need to make regularly (perhaps around refunds or escalation), and work with them to create a customer-friendly default position that could be built into your systems instead.
Customer support is key
While good customer support doesn’t create customer-centric companies on its own, it’s an essential element in maintaining them. Support is a renewable source of customer insights, feeding information about customers and how they think about your products and services back into the business.
Businesses who wish to be customer-centric must have access to those customers in as many different ways as possible, and customer support is the highest volume, most consistent channel for that access.
Your support team can represent the voice of the customer internally, sharing their stories, collecting their desires, learning the ways they explain the problems they need to solve.
In a customer-centric company, the support team should be embedded into your product, marketing, and sales discussions so that all of their decisions can be informed by customer insights.
Even with the best information in the world, perfection is impossible, but the good news is that well-resolved imperfection might be even better.
Action item: Add a support team member to your regular product team meetings so they can hear what’s coming up and contribute customer-facing insights directly.
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Mistakes are an opportunity to recenter
Sorry seems to be the hardest word, according to Elton John, and that seems to be true for many companies — or at least in the top three after “cancel” and "unsubscribe.” But a good apology can be a powerful thing.
Research into the service recovery paradox has shown that customers who run into an issue but have it resolved fairly to their satisfaction are happier than those who never had an issue.
That service recovery may be a financial refund, but could simply be listening openly and taking responsibility. Even a major issue can lead to long-term growth in customer trust if those customers believe the company is genuinely taking action in their interests.
Buffer’s clear disclosure of a security breach is an excellent example of a company which has always claimed to be transparent following through on that promise in difficult circumstances. It’s another example of an operational decision — building a business to be open and transparent — shaping the outcome in a specific moment.
Customer-centric businesses will treat outages, mistakes, and problems as a chance to show their customers that they remain in the center of their business. When the structures of the business support customer-centric decision making, it’s safe and simple for staff to make the right call. Of course it’s not always people making those decisions, is it?
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AI and the customer-centric company
Could an LLM be said to “make a customer-centric decision?” In some sense, absolutely. AI tools can do customer-centric work when they are built into a system that has been shaped by a customer-centric business, one that has wrestled with the role of AI in their company. What will they allow it to do, and what should be reserved for human judgment?
Who will take responsibility when the AI gets it wrong? What options are available to customers who wish to connect with a person, not a machine? There will be customer-centric companies who don’t use much AI and others who are AI-first because the technology is not the deciding factor.
Implementing artificial intelligence is in part also an operational decision about how and where customers will interact with a business. Selecting the right tools and building in the right boundaries is what will either enhance or disrupt the customer-centric nature of a business. It’s not the size of the language model, it’s how you use it.
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Gravity always wins
Being customer-centric isn’t about having “we love our customers” posters up in the office, or those messages that constantly interrupt the hold music to tell people how important they are while they continue not to be served.
It’s the unseen focus of the business, that point around which all those tools and processes circle even without intending to. It doesn’t matter what a company says is at its center because its actions reveal the truth. It shows in the way they speak to customers, how they respond to mistakes, and who gets to make judgment calls. The truth is in there.
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Mathew Patterson
A veteran support leader, Mat spent years teaching better online support at Help Scout before founding More Human Content. Subscribe to The Supportive or find him on LinkedIn.
