Building Customer-centric Organizations

Although the number of companies declaring their commitment to the concept of customer centricity is increasing, many of these companies are struggling to actually shape their organization accordingly. In this article we share the results of our research, which aims to identify key shaping factors that help organizations move towards customer centricity, and key barriers that typically deter organizations from becoming customer-centric. Based on a literature review and field research among both practitioners and academics, we have identified a set of nine shaping factors and three barriers to building customer-centric organizations and explored these in more detail. Our study suggests that there are no simple recipes or shortcuts for organizations to become customer-centric. Instead, companies can reap sustainable competitive advantage from evolving the ability to master nine shaping factors and evade three barriers to customer centricity.