Eight questions that test whether customer focus is an operating reality or a values-slide claim, from the evidence behind decisions to who owns the journey and what the metrics actually measure.
Every organisation says it is customer-centric; the claim is unfalsifiable as stated. This assessment restates it as eight checkable conditions about how decisions, ownership, feedback and metrics actually work, and scores them the same way every time.
Last reviewed 3 July 2026 · Free and ungated
Selected senior operators from the Global Board will pressure-test what your organisation believes about its customers, confidentially, before the next commitment.
Get independent perspectivesAnswer from what happened in the last two quarters, not from the values statement.
Customer-centricity here is a belief system, not an operating system: evidence decorates decisions rather than driving them, and no one owns the experience between departmental borders. Customers experience the org chart. The commercial symptom is usually slow, unexplained attrition.
The listening apparatus exists (surveys, dashboards, a CX team) but the acting apparatus does not: feedback flows in and authority does not flow back out. This band often feels customer-centric internally because so much customer activity is visible; customers experience the same journeys regardless.
Customer evidence genuinely moves decisions here, and ownership is more than a diagram. The characteristic weakness is selective hearing: the machinery amplifies the customers you already serve well, while the ones leaving, and the ones you never win, stay statistically invisible.
These answers describe an organisation where customer evidence carries real authority: decisions reverse, owners act, metrics resist gaming. What remains is the hardest problem: customers can tell you clearly what they experience today and almost nothing about what they will value in three years.
Ask any leadership team whether they are customer-centric and the answer is yes; the question contains no way to be wrong. Restate it as operating conditions (evidence that overturns preferences, journeys with owners, feedback with consequences, metrics that resist gaming) and the claim becomes checkable. The checking is usually uncomfortable in specific, fixable ways.
Eight questions, three fixed answers each at 0, 5 or 10 points, normalised to a score out of 100 across four bands. Nothing you select leaves your browser, and there is no interpretive layer between your answers and the result.
This assessment is unusually easy to flatter, because every question touches identity. The corrective is specificity: for any answer where you reached for the 10, require a named example from the last two quarters. If the example takes more than a minute to find, score the 5.
Satisfaction metrics measure what customers report; this assessment measures whether your organisation is built to act on what they report. The metric-quality question exists precisely because a strong score can coexist with a weak operating reality, and conceal it.
At minimum, one executive, one middle manager who owns customer-facing delivery, and one person close to the frontline. The divergence between their answers locates where the customer-centric narrative and the daily reality part company.
Take the contradiction seriously: one of the two signals is wrong. Either the self-assessment was generous, or your feedback machinery is systematically missing the customers who leave. Both are worth independent examination before the next strategy cycle.