Our Customer Centricity Study

Commissioned by Google

We benchmarked over 110 organisations in our customer centricity study. Find out what makes the high-performers special.

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Discover all of our findings by downloading our free ‘State of Customer Centricity’ white paper.

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About the study

Europe’s biggest customer centricity survey

8countries Including leaders in retail, finance, healthcare, utilities, travel and telecoms in United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Poland, South Africa.

110 Number of organisations engaged in our personalised report and benchmarking study. This included a mix of startups and heritage organisations.

1973 Average year that organisations were founded.

24,000 Average number of employees.
5% of organisations had over 200,000 staff.

It is a game-changing report that removed bias and pin-pointed where to invest

Ricardo Abreu CPO, ePayments

Key findings

Faster growth

The companies that scored highest in our customer centricity index grew 9X times faster than their competitors. Why? They’re better at keeping customers and attracting new ones.

9x Revenue growth

More satisfied employees

Customer-centric operating models give employees a clear mission, enabling everyone to see how they make a difference. In the battle for talent, a customer-centric operating model offers a clear advantage. The lesson? Job purpose builds organisational profit.

90% High employee satisfaction

More nimble

Organisations with customer-centric operating models are faster to adapt. 65% could change business processes within weeks or months, responding quickly and decisively to market shifts. Low maturity organisations (69%) take years to change.

65% Can make changes in weeks or months

5 keys to customer centricity

1. 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.

2x Teams with autonomy act decisively, validating and implementing decisions twice as fast

2. 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’.

2x High performers are twice as likely to use qualitative customer insights to make strategic decisions

3. 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.

4x High performing brands are over four times more likely to deliver changes to user interfaces efficiently using employee-friendly design system tooling

4. 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.

5x High-performing organisations were almost five times as likely as low-performing organisations to have specialist user researchers embedded within product teams

5. 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.

5x High performers are three times as likely to score the highest levels for Communication compared to other dimensions

Learn more about Our Customer Centricity Study

Alix Vaughan

Reach out to Alix Vaughan

Sales Director