In today’s competitive landscape, businesses must focus on meeting the needs of their customers to remain relevant and successful. This means shifting away from product-centric business models and adopting a more customer-centric approach. The focus on a customer-centric approach includes increased customer loyalty, improved customer satisfaction, greater customer lifetime value, and ultimately, higher revenue and profitability.
A product-centric approach focuses on creating and selling products that meet the needs and interests of the business first while a customer-centric approach focuses on the needs and interests of the customer first to create products and services to meet their needs.
Important note: There is a common misconception that being product-centric is the same as being product-led. Product-led growth is a highly successful marketing strategy that often supports a customer-centric approach, not a product-centric approach.
Most organizations approach experience design with a product-centric mindset. In contrast, customer-centric design requires teams to think and work with a cross-functional viewpoint that is centered on your customer’s journey.
Product-Centric | Customer-Centric | |
Focus | Features and customer needs within a product | Customer needs, goals, and experiences across journey touchpoints |
Goal | Improve the product to enable interactions and increase revenue | Improve customer and business outcomes and create seamless and cohesive customer experiences |
Change Mindset Before You Change Operations
Operationalizing customer-centricity requires organizations to create a culture around customer experience:
Create a shared understanding across the business, design disciplines, and product teams about the benefits of customer-centricity and the costs of not adopting it.
Be proactive about change-management efforts to support the staff whose day-to-day work will be most affected. Provide education and mentoring so that there is buy-in before there are deliverables.
Don’t Rush and Start Small
Start with an initial pilot and expand after a few cycles of successes. This allows employees to get up-to-speed, discuss the changes with colleagues, and build a sense of individual ownership over the strategy.
Showcase successful customer journey designed efforts and explain how a customer-centric approach supports operations that helped achieve these successes.
Establish Governance and Support
Establish Governance. It’s critical to codify process methodology. Create a customer-centric governance group with a clearly defined charter with clearly defined measurable business objectives.
Support Trial and Error. Achieving customer-centric maturity requires some trial and error to find the work practices that suits your organization. Initial operational processes will likely need adjustment as the program grows and changes. Support change as it happens. Few transformations get everything “right” on the first try.
Focus on Business Goals and Business Objectives
Focus on business goals. Customer-centricity brings together human-centered design workers and business stakeholders who own the business operations behind the delivery of customer journeys. Effective communication is paramount in bridging the gap between design and business leaders. Identifying opportunities based on business outcomes and articulating design decisions in business language fosters alignment and support, enabling organizations to leverage journey-centric design as a strategic tool for innovation and growth.
Clearly define customer experience business objectives. Develop a prioritization method based on business objectives, defining shared priorities for journey teams and product teams. This means that work done by product teams will include both product-centric and journey-centric efforts that are prioritized based on the overarching strategy and business priorities. This approach will help create alignment and foster cooperation around shared goals.
Embrace the Journey
There’s No Such Thing as “Done”. The work required to be a best-in-class, customer-centric organization is never over. Technology evolves, and customer expectations continue to rise. That means organizations must iterate on their CX operations, overcome challenges, and replicate best practices in areas still newly established or maturing. This evolution requires attention to experimentation and iteration, consistency, and patience
Transformation doesn’t happen uniformly across an entire organization, even with broad leadership support. Most organizations experience pockets of success. A specific business sector or a regional sector may lead the charge, while some business units may lag. That means that, no matter the size of the organization, it must be committed to fostering experimentation and growing its expertise in service of the customer experience.
To remain relevant and competitive in today’s business landscape, it is essential for businesses to make the shift to a more customer-centric approach. By doing so, your business can increase customer satisfaction and loyalty, improve innovation and develop a stronger brand reputation. Adopting a customer-centric model can be the key to your long-term success.
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Flaherty, Kim. Journey-Centric Design Lessons Learned: From Culture Change to Process Governance. Nielsen Norman Group. January 24, 2025. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/journey-centric-design-lessons
Tidrick, Luna. Moving from a product-centric to a customer-centric model. SupportNinja. July 18, 2023. https://www.supportninja.com/articles/moving-from-a-product-centric-to-a-customer-centric-model
Droga, David and Shah, Baiju. Keeping Up with Customers’ Increasingly Dynamic Needs. Harvard Business Review. September 27, 2022