Driving growth through customer-centricity
30 September 2025
Reading time: 4 minutes
With customer-centricity, you’re not only structuring your business around the needs of your customers, but using that insight to guide how decisions are made, and work gets done. It's a concept that’s getting more airtime in boardrooms, but most initiatives don’t go beyond brand campaigns or customer service scripts. Real change begins when customer insight shapes how the business actually runs, informing everyday decisions and guiding how internal processes are designed.
It can be helpful to look at companies who are putting this into practice.
When saying 'customer first' isn’t enough
Many B2B businesses claim to be customer-focused, but the reality often tells a different story. Feedback gets collected without leading to change; sales journeys are digitised but difficult to navigate; experience gets split between teams with no one owning the full picture, and customers feel the disconnect.
What sets truly customer-led organisations apart is how well they act on what they learn. Dow, a manufacturing and industrial company, consolidated its journey mapping and customer data across the business (EY, 2023). That alignment made it easier to spot and fix problems, while giving their digital channels a major lift in leads. It worked because feedback became a reliable factor in how they made decisions.
Make insight operational
Real customer-centricity shows up in how a business runs day to day: insight becomes embedded in workflows, not just surfaced in reports. If you want customer insight to lead to real change, it needs to be baked into how the business works. That could mean reworking team structures or giving people better tools to pick up and act on feedback in the moment. It’s not quick or easy work, but it does make a long term difference.
Analog Devices (ADI), a global electronics company, spoke directly to over 5,000 engineers and used that feedback to rebuild their digital experience (Deloitte, 2024). They focused on making things easier to find, easier to use, and more relevant to the person on the other end. Instead of collecting feedback for reporting's sake, they used it to shape the way their tools actually worked. And it paid off.
Graham & Brown, a UK-based wallpaper and home décor brand, did something similar with its B2B platform. They launched a new e-commerce experience built entirely around what their trade customers said they needed (PowerCommerce, 2025). This included faster ordering tools, print-to-order options, stock visibility, and multi-currency support. Within 12 weeks, 90% of key trade accounts had adopted it – proof that designing around real customer input can reduce friction and build stronger relationships quickly. It also positioned personalisation as a clear lever for long-term B2B growth.
Make customer experience everyone’s job
One of the biggest shifts businesses can make is moving customer experience out of the ‘CX’ team and into every function. That means sales, ops, products, and logistics all taking ownership.
Not every team needs to do everything. But they do need to understand how their role connects to the customer, and be equipped to make it better.
Put your customers at the heart of everything you do
The companies making the most progress are those that treat customer insight as a core operational input, so that it actually shapes decisions.
This might mean changing what you measure, how feedback loops are built, or where digital tools sit in the sales cycle. Whatever the path, the principle stays the same: growth tends to follow when customers are factored into how decisions are made, and how work gets done.
Where to focus next:
- Look at where insight gets stuck. Are you capturing feedback but not acting on it?
- Ask where digital tools can remove friction. What’s slowing customers down unnecessarily?
- Build feedback into operations. Can insight shape decisions (and not just dashboards)?
- Make it cultural. Are teams supported to prioritise customer experience in their ways of working?