What Narrative Tells Us About Customer-Centricity
Every company says it's customer-centric. Their narratives say otherwise. Only 18% describe their customer's world better than their own product.
When I started running narrative coherence diagnostics, one thing became clear very fast. Companies are pretty darn good at describing themselves, their products and services. Most decently describe the problem they solve (and man it’s bad news if they can’t). But far fewer adequately describe their customer’s world, customer goals and how they should evaluate solutions.
None of that is surprising. Though every company on the planet says it’s customer-centric, it’s still really, really hard not to navel-gaze and talk endlessly about scalable, seamless, best-in-class platforms. Every company and every employee spends a vast majority of their time thinking about their product. What features to build, how to market them, who their target customers are and how to acquire them. And because of this reality, only 18% (27 of the 150) of companies in the Narrative Coherence Benchmark describe their customer’s world better than they describe their own product. (98 do the opposite.)
So what separates the companies that describe their customers’ world well from the ones that don’t? My first guess was volume. High-scoring companies must just write more about the customer and low-scoring companies must just write more about the product. It would make sense. If a company is going to navel-gaze, it might as well go all in on every feature, capability and logo.
But as it turns out, I was wrong. Across 150 companies, 18,501 passages and 450,787 words, every company dedicates about the same amount of narrative real estate to the customer and itself, regardless of its score (or its use of buzzwords).
| Score | Customer-focused (Narrative Premise) | Company-focused (Narrative Resolution) |
|---|---|---|
| 2.5 | 54.6% | 45.3% |
| 3.0 | 54.1% | 45.8% |
| 3.5 | 54.4% | 45.6% |
| 4.0 | 55.5% | 44.6% |
This sorta blew my mind. Companies with weak scores don’t give less attention to the customer, they give the same as everyone else, within about a point and a half across every score band. They just don’t say it with much depth.
And that brings us back to customer-centricity. Amazon is arguably the most customer-centric company on earth and it’s grown into one of the most valuable companies around. And, Forrester reported in May 2024 that customer-obsessed companies grow revenue 28% faster than companies that aren’t.
Being customer-centric works! Companies write their values, customer-centricity goes in the top three, leadership rolls it out and then, bang, the culture delivers customer-centricity into every decision. And then… growth. Right?
Wrong. In most companies, nobody explains customer-centric behavior clearly, how people should act differently today versus yesterday. The tradeoffs. The actions. Putting it to work on a Tuesday. So every team fills in the blanks in their own way. The company builds for the loudest customer, not the right one. It tries to make every customer happy, whether they’re worth the time or not. And the narrative hand-waves around the customer as a way to talk more about the company.
Customer-centricity without action is just words on a page. And the Narrative Coherence scores show it.
Luckily, it’s not that complicated. It starts and ends with a deep and ongoing customer understanding. Asking them which market changes affect them and how. Searching for the root cause of their challenges. Asking them what their goals are and what happens if they overcome the challenges, how they evaluate solutions and what they value in a vendor. And then doing that repeatedly, every day, across functions and sharing what one part of the organization learns with the others.
OK, fine. It’s hard. But it’s not complicated.
When companies do the hard work to be customer-centric, internal alignment happens naturally. PMs know what to build, CS knows how to service customers, marketing knows what to prioritize and sales knows how to win. In fact, Forrester found that companies with high alignment across their customer-facing functions report 2.4x higher revenue growth than companies without it.
So how can anyone tell whether a company is actually customer-centric, or just says it is? Read what it says in public. The website, pitch deck and thought leadership all reflect what the company understands and believes about its market and customers.
Is your company actually customer-centric, or are you comfortable just saying you are?