Linking Customer Focus With Business Performance

The concept of the 'customer-centric business' is pervasive, with companies small and large, across every industry, making efforts to improve customer focus. This is no doubt good as businesses would not exist without customers. However companies run the risk that efforts to increase customer focus become disconnected from business performance. If they do not deliver business value, customer-centric initiatives are not likely to stick.

In this paper, we discuss the need for a direct connection between efforts to increase customer focus and performance of the business. We introduce a framework to define how customer-centric initiatives drive value, and then isolate metrics to measure and manage.