Is customer strategy broken (and how to fix it)?
Customer first, customer centric, customer obsessed … bold ambitions for delivering superior customer experiences are everywhere, often framed as a company’s competitive edge. In reality, however, many organisations struggle to live up to these promises, as they face a widening gap between operational barriers and complex customer expectations.
There is a lot of talk about customer strategy these days. Everywhere you look, you see slides and slogans about customer centricity. Which is great. A strong focus on customer needs from the top down is exactly what consumer businesses should invest in. But I cannot help wondering whether the bold management ambitions are truly being operationalised into the customer strategy, or if the customer-first mantra remains just a catchphrase.
Many companies still operate in a functionally led structure with separate departments for sales, marketing, service, logistics, etc. Teams, systems, and tools are organised for internal efficiency, designed to manage predictable customer journeys at scale. But today’s funnel is anything but predictable. It is a shifting web of technologies, touchpoints, and channels that shape the path to purchase. Digital investments and product teams are often misaligned with customer pain points and the key moments of activation that matter most.
Additionally, many executives still view customer experience as a cost rather than a growth driver – a perception that dictates priorities, budgets, and leadership attention. As a result, strategies frequently stall, even though evidence shows that satisfied customers spend more, stay longer, and advocate for the brand.
This lack of traction is reinforced by outdated approaches to insight. Static dashboards and slow reporting cycles cannot keep pace with fast-changing behaviour and fragmented journeys. The real advantage lies in recognising buying decisions as they happen, serving relevant content in the moment, and making the purchasing process so seamless and quick that customers are eager to return.
This raises the million-dollar question: If the complexity of today’s customer experience really does demand a new approach, can most businesses honestly claim to deliver on customer expectations? Is that what they do? And if not, is it time to rewrite the customer strategy and more closely align customer needs with digital and business capabilities?
A step-by-step framework
Bridging the gap between declared customer focus and the way companies actually operate requires a way of working that makes customer experience the authoritative lens for decisions across functions, budgets, and priorities, so that ambition at the top translates into action in daily execution.
At Deloitte, we approach customer strategy in a fragmented landscape by operationalising ambitions through a clear framework and working through the layers step by step:
1. Start with a to-be experience as your north star. Define the future end-to-end customer experience by segment/category: where the journey should improve, the moments that matter, and the KPIs that prove value. Then map that future experience onto the entire customer journey, showing how it should come to life at each stage, from awareness and consideration through purchase and advocacy.
2. Tie journeys to concrete activation that is proven to make the customer more prone to buy your product. For each step, spell out what changes in pricing, marketing, propositions, content, shops, clienteling, e-commerce, and service – and who owns what. In doing so, you directly connect experience to funding.
3. Align digital investments to the new blueprint, creating a clear line of sight from customer journeys to architectural decisions, new applications, and how they reinforce one another. Take personalisation as an example – it likely involves 10 or more product teams. If one fails or lacks coordination, the impact will ripple across the rest.
4. Democratise customer insights by replacing slow, static reporting with insights at scale. Explore agentic AI tools that can be leveraged to conduct large-scale customer interviews, surface patterns, and generate actionable decisions within hours rather than months. This makes it possible to understand deeper buying motivations at the exact moment they happen, serve relevant content, and compress the purchase flow so it leaves customers wanting more.
5. Assign end-to-end accountability for the customer experience. As an example, Salling Group recently appointed a Chief Customer Officer with responsibility for uniting customer-related activities across the organisation, ranging from group branding, digital marketing, market intelligence, and loyalty programmes to coordinating the marketing departments across retail chains. While the jury is still out, it seems to offer a hybrid fix to functional structures and short-circuit fragmentation.
6. Prove it small, then scale. Run short sprints in one category or segment: prototype the to-be experience, launch the key activations, track KPIs, learn fast, and then roll out to more markets and categories. The data which is generated should feed into iterative loops and make the next decision even better.
7. Put value realisation at the heart of your customer effort by ruthlessly measuring business impact, not just sentiment. Tie experience work to hard metrics such as customer lifetime value, retention, and share of wallet, not only NPS. Value realisation is not a new term, but it is almost always underestimated.
A framework for executing customer strategy centers the organisation on the customer journey, builds a closed loop between data and activation, and gives leadership a clear line of sight from experience to value, while recognising that most companies cannot rebuild their organisational chart overnight.
