Customer Centricity
Customer centricity is not putting the customer at the center of corporate slides. It's giving the team that talks to the customer every day the power to change an internal process without having to convince five levels of management.
“A company is truly customer centric when a customer feedback changes an internal process in weeks, not when it cites it in a board slide once a year.”
Otto GTM ObservatoryThe change-speed test
The real test of customer centricity isn't how often the company declares it listens to customers, but how fast collected feedback translates into a concrete operational change: a modified onboarding process, a re-prioritized feature, a revised support criterion.
This requires giving real decision-making authority to teams in direct customer contact (customer success, support), not just a formal feedback collection channel ending up in a backlog never discussed with operational priority.
Anti-patterns
Common mistake: systematically collecting customer feedback but without a process guaranteeing real operational priority, letting it accumulate in a backlog never discussed with management.
Second mistake: declaring customer centricity as a corporate value without giving the customer success team any real authority to modify internal processes based on what they hear daily from customers.
Practical Application
A company introduces a weekly process where the customer success team can directly propose product changes based on recurring feedback, with a decision within 5 business days. Within 6 months, 14 process changes get implemented through this channel, versus 2 implemented the previous year when feedback went through a quarterly product review cycle.