What it really means to be ‘customer-centric’

It’s much easier for organisations to pay lip-service to the notion that their customers should be at the centre of their attentions, than for organisations actually to put that philosophy into practice.


Paying lip-service to the ‘customers-first’ philosophy is easy; implementing it is more difficult. It requires a real imaginative effort, and often an emotional investment, to understand and empathise wholeheartedly with your customers’ agenda.

How much easier it is to focus on your own organisational stuff, your own agenda, your own preoccupations! Research carried out by Charteris suggests that most organisations devote about 70 percent of their time and energy to their own internal stuff and only about 30 percent to adding value for customers.

In fact, the ratio should, ideally, be numerically exactly the opposite. If you’re not devoting at least 70 percent of your time and effort to adding value for your customers, the chances are you’re not impressing your customers very much and very likely also risking your market share.

‘Customer centricity’, a term that has been around since the 1990s, is being spoken of today with more and more respect by an increasingly large number of professionals. They believe it represents the way ahead for organisations that a) really care about their customers and want to be all they can be to them; b) want to take that feeling of caring and put it into practice.

A useful definition of customer centricity would be the process of ensuring that every individual and department within an organisation is taking every feasible step to add value to what the organisation does for its customers.

Today, Charteris is one of the UK’s leading consultancies in the area of customer centricity, bringing a powerful combination of strategic and tactical techniques to help organisations put their customers at the very heart of everything the organisation does.

Charteris’s theory and practise of the philosophy of customer centricity is encapsulated in Stephen Hewett’s The Customer Centric You (Management Books 2000) published in February 2011 (ISBN 978-1852526726). Stephen Hewett is Charteris’s head of business consulting.



James Essinger