At Amazon, the company’s number one leadership principle is “Customer Obsession.” Every employee, at every level, is trained to put the customer first. Not only that, but each workflow is customer-centric, whether that’s developing better cloud infrastructure at AWS, strategizing on how to speed up deliveries for Prime members, or writing press releases before new features are put on the roadmap. The reasons Amazon does this are simple: obsession wins customer loyalty and increases customer lifetime value. 

Your business doesn’t have to be Amazon to transform into a customer-focused organization. You just need a system for including the customer in every decision you make. And the best way to do that is by creating a complete picture of the customer journey. 

Customer-centricity comes in many forms - but one thing is clear: if you don’t make customer journeys a part of your overall business strategy, you’ll lose out on valuable opportunities for short-term and long-term success.

At TheyDo, we help hundreds of business leaders become more customer-centric by providing them the tools to support their customers across their customer journeys, turning journey maps into dynamic systems that deliver actionable insights that then translate into revenue. 

In this article, we break down the five stages of journey excellence - from isolated and fractured to synchronized and well-governed.


Why we developed
this model

We noticed that many of our clients are interested in becoming more customer-centric, but are overwhelmed by the prospect of transforming how they run their business to meet this goal. 

If this sounds like you, do not fear. First of all, you may be further along than you think. Second of all, if you break the process down step-by-step it becomes a lot less daunting.

At TheyDo, we work with many different types of organizations to transform their processes and make them customer-centric across the board. To quickly assess how and where to make the biggest impact we use a 5-stage model. 

Too often, customer-centric thinking is only available to a handful of individuals, such as a Sales lead or even the CMO. These innovators in their organization have a hard time convincing others that working customer-centric is driving business results.

The model helps us to identify where a company is in the process of becoming customer-centric, and quickly see the big picture of what needs to be done.

Without a framework, you will not succeed and without knowing where you are, you will not know where to go. So without further ado, here is that framework.

The 5 levels of customer-centric transformation

Customer-centricity is a gradual process, but it’s worth it in the end. Each level of this framework has been based on interviews and surveys with TheyDo customers, and experience within our own organization. The five levels are, from most to least customer-centric:

• Excellence

• Scalable

• Coordinated

• Fragmented

• Intuition

Most companies currently fall in the Intuition category, but moving up the pyramid is simply a matter of process and tooling.

Level 5: Excellence

Customer-centricity is in the fabric of the organization. These companies are robust in all the dimensions of customer-centricity, but what really separates them from the others is customer involvement in the strategy:

• The customer-centric business model identifies opportunities at all touchpoints of the customer journey.  

• The customer-centric culture of the team makes it so that customer wins as perceived as personal wins 

• Key business metrics centered on the customer, such as customer satisfaction rates, retention, and lifetime value are consistently high. 

Level 4: Scalable

When things go truly customer-centric: Business strategy and goals revolve around customer needs. There is a dedicated team for overseeing customer journey management and tools.

Journey management processes are written down and shared in employee onboarding.  Those processes are refined on a regular basis. 

Customer feedback is incorporated into every product development decision, and there’s a flywheel in place for gathering that feedback and transforming it into actionable insights that everyone on the team can use. Indicators such as net promoter score is measured and used to guide decisions.

Level 3: Coordinated

Being customer-first is becoming the new normal for teams outside of Customer Sucess, Support, and Sales. Product, Marketing, and Engineering teams are incorporating customer interviews and incorporating customer insights into their roadmaps. Budgets & processes are formalized.

Level 2: Fragmented

Customer-centric initiatives start making an impact. These first real results show proof of a customer-centric approach. However, they are still occurring sporadically, in silos. 

Customer behavior is being tracked in a CRM but it’s not being utilized to its full capabilities. The Sales team is not communicating their insights to the Customer Success team and vice versa. Mid-level managers see the need for change. 

Level 1: Intuition

There’s no global system for documenting customer feedback or measuring customer satisfaction (such as a net promoter score) and the customer journey is not documented. A handful of innovators are working customer-centric in isolation. Leadership is not convinced of the need for including the customer's voice in decision-making. 

Maturity indicators

Theydo’s free Maturity Scan offers more than just a single score on where your company ranks on the scale of Journey Excellence. To determine what customer-centricity looks like across the five stages, the questionnaire analyzes six different sectors of your business: 

• Governance - How does Leadership maintain and measure a high standard of customer-centricity across the organization?

• Process - What recurring operations are in place to include the customer at all stages of development?

• Culture - How does the team thinks and speak about the customer?

• Organization - Teams and roles are dedicated to improving the customer experience

• Measurement - Which KPIs are used for the customer journey and how accurate and relevant is the data?

• Tools - Which tools, including CRMs and other SaaS products, are being used for customer journey management and how effective are they?

The results of the test provide a detailed breakdown of where your company stands, for example:

These scores are not a judgment, but rather a validation of pain points you may already feel on your path towards customer journey success.

The benefits of customer obsession

In our recent survey on the ROI of customer journey management, we found that companies that implement a customer-centric journey management system enjoy benefits at every level of the organization:

• Team level: visual journey mapping, documentation of customer feedback

• Cross-team: standardized process, single source of truth, no duplicated work, aligned priorities

• Company-wide:  improved NPS, increased retention, higher revenue, lower churn rate, lower costs

With coordinated efforts and a journey management tool, you can also see huge improvements at your company and in your customer relationships. 

How a tool like TheyDo helps teams become more customer-centric

Customer journey management systems like TheyDo work with your existing data and knowledge to form a more complete picture of the customer journey. It’s not a CRM, but it does help you build stronger customer relationships.

In the screenshot below, a Telecom provider maps the customer journey for buying a mobile subscription.

All of the customer personas are buying a new mobile subscription, but are taking various steps and detours to get there. All these possibilities are recorded in Theydo.

This is basically journey mapping, which you may be familiar with. However, a journey management tool goes beyond the journey map to collect customer data in real-time across various journeys, identify opportunities to improve the customer experience, create solutions to address them and deliver those solutions.

Eventually, all the journeys are collated and organized to complete a picture of the overall Customer Lifecycle:

From one single location, you and your team members can transform customer insights into new products. We call this the Triple Diamond framework:

Customer-centricity isn’t just about interviewing customers once a year, creating some personas and a funnel, and calling it a day.

It’s an ongoing process of discovery, validation, development, and feedback. A journey management tool has all of these actions built in.

Examples of customer centricity in action

Over the years, we’ve worked with hundreds of organizations that have transformed into customer-centric organizations. Here are just a few examples:

• How NCR implements journey management at scale

• Bol identified the needs of its 36,000 partners

• Jumbo conquered fragmentation and changed its workflow

With coordinated efforts and a journey management tool, you can also see huge improvements at your company.

How customer-centric are you?

One of the most productive starting points to customer centricity is this Customer Maturity assessment we offer our clients. 

It only takes a few minutes and it’s completely free.