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Why Companies Say They’re Customer-Centric—But Fall Short
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Most companies claim to be customer-centric. It’s plastered on their websites, preached in meetings, and celebrated in campaigns. But ask them what they actually do differently, and you’ll often be met with silence.
They collect feedback but rarely act on it.
They measure NPS and call it “listening.”
They react to complaints of proactively learning.
Here’s why customer intelligence is broken—and how companies should tackle these challenges to be able to call themselves truly customer centric.
The Organizational Problem: Companies Don’t Operationalize Feedback
Companies collect feedback through surveys, support tickets, and social sentiment monitoring, but the process stops there. Feedback is collected, not operationalized.
Customer insights live in silos:
- Support has one version of the truth.
- Research has another.
- Sales has a completely different take.
The result? Teams argue over data of acting on it. Insights remain trapped in static reports of driving real change.
How to Operationalize Feedback
Create a centralized system where feedback is automatically categorized, prioritized, and routed to the right teams. Implement tools that integrate insights into product roadmaps and customer service workflows.
The PM Problem: Intuition vs. Reality
The best product managers never stop shadowing sales calls, reading support tickets, or doomscrolling mean tweets. They know that great product intuition isn’t magic—it’s built by staying close to customer reality.
But as companies scale, PMs get further removed from direct customer conversations. , they rely on:
- Secondhand insights
- Summaries
- Filtered reports
The best companies build systems that keep PMs connected to raw customer intelligence—not just when they have time, but as a way of working.
How to help PMs stay close to customer reality
Generate automated digests or insights streams to help product builders have a constant supply to update their intuition.
The Leadership Dissonance: Insights vs. Confirmation Bias
Leaders say they want more customer evidence. But too often, they’re just looking for confirmation of existing plans and decisions. This creates thrash for everyone and erodes trust and confidence in leadership.Real customer intelligence isn’t more than validation — it includes discovery and updating perspectives based on evidence. The best leaders don’t just ask for insights—they create cultures and rituals where feedback is helpful for increasing confidence in decisions and can also shape new directions.
How to support Leadership to build customer centric culture
Establish rituals like monthly “challenge meetings” where teams present insights that contradict existing strategies to ensure decisions are grounded in reality.
Decision Makers Rely Too Heavily on Reports
Many organizations lean too much on static reports to make customer-driven decisions. The problem? Reports come with serious limitations:
- Over-reliance on people: Teams manually aggregate, interpret, and synthesize insights, making the process slow and error-prone.
- Reports are slow and resource-intensive: By the time reports are created, the insights are often outdated, leading to reactive rather than proactive decision-making.
- Manual labeling and synthesis: Parsing through massive volumes of feedback requires human effort, which slows down analysis and increases the risk of bias.
How to reduce dependence on static reports
Replace static reports with real-time alerts and insights that automatically extract themes, trends, and key insights from customer feedback at scale.
The Cross-Functional Problem: Fragmented Insights & Siloed Execution
Every customer-facing team—Support, Sales, CX, Research—wants to advocate for customers. But without a unified strategy, their impact is diluted by:
- Siloed insights
- Conflicting priorities
- Disjointed timing
Companies end up listening to customers in pieces of as a whole. The best organizations orchestrate feedback. They build systems where insights are synchronized, prioritized, and delivered when and where they’re needed most.
How to align teams around customer insights
Align on a consistent cadence, ie 6 weeks before product planning or x weeks after large launches.
The Biggest Mistake: Companies Invest Too Late in Customer Intelligence
Many companies only invest in customer intelligence when it’s too late. They assume it’s a scaling problem. But by the time they feel the pain, it’s already too late:
- Bad habits are set.
- Expectations are locked.
- Customer disconnect is baked in.
These challenges create a disconnect: PMs are expected to make critical decisions without direct customer input. Leaders bring in top-tier PMs and assume they can develop deep customer intuition in months—when in reality, it takes years of exposure. At the same time, executives often seek data that reinforces their existing plans rather than challenges them. Meanwhile, teams operate in silos, each holding onto their own version of “customer truth.”Customer intelligence isn’t a scaling problem; it’s a foundation problem. The best companies don’t wait until things break. They build listening systems before they need them. Because once the pain sets in, you’re not building a system—you’re doing damage control.
How to build a culture of customer intelligence early
Invest in hiring a dedicated person or team to focus on this problem. See how a few of our customers do this right
- Jesse Walker, Head of User Voice at Canva
- Adena Bauer, Head of Membership at The Browser Company
- Kayla Eliaza Head of User Insights at Notion
The Shift: AI Is Changing What’s Possible
AI is redefining customer intelligence. The companies that win won’t just collect feedback—they’ll build real-time listening systems.Customer intelligence isn’t a report. It’s not a survey. It’s an operating system for how great companies build.How to leverage AI for customer intelligenceYour team should be aggregating all unstructured customer feedback into a single source of truth. Tools like Enterpret make it easy to automate this analysis and insight generate but surface this at the right time so your teams can act on immediately.
Join the Movement
If you’re working in VoC, CX, or product, this is the moment to act. Building customer intelligence into how companies operate isn’t just important—it’s essential.
- Get inspired: Follow Enterpret on LinkedIn
- Be a part of the movement: Community Waitlist - launches Spring 2025
Customer intelligence is evolving faster than ever. Now is the time to shape its future—let’s build it together.
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