The intention-habit gap in customer-centricity
by Tijs Besieux, PhD
As 2026 Q4 approaches, companies are finalizing their 2027 strategy. Many of those strategies will include phrases like “customer intimacy,” “customer centricity,” or “customer first.”
If we jumped ahead to mid‑2027, the picture would often be disappointing. For many of these companies, little will have changed in how customers experience the business or in the economics that matter.
I call this the intention–habit gap. It is simple, painful, and fixable.
The pattern I keep seeing
In 16 years of working with executive teams, the pattern is almost identical:
At a strategy off‑site, a respected executive says customer intimacy must be a top priority.
Heads nod. The phrase lands in the strategy deck.
It cascades into town halls, transformation teams, and company‑wide goals around retention, NPS, and churn.
For two or three months, there is buzz. People talk more about the customer. Then momentum stalls.
Why?
Because the transformation taskforces are doing this on top of their day jobs, in siloed pockets. The employees who were inspired in the town hall run into daily friction: conflicting KPIs, internal decision rules, and reward systems that never truly changed.
The intention–habit gap widens because the executive committee never asks the hardest question:
If customer intimacy is truly “the way we do things around here,” what behaviors must we, as leaders, display every day to make that real?
A diagnostic that cuts through the fog
I recently worked with a B2B retail company whose first strategy slide read:
“Our mission is to improve the lives of our customers by deepening our relationships so we know what they need, and when they need it.”
So I asked them to take out a piece of paper and answer three questions, individually:
Who are your company’s five most valuable customers, and why?
What are the two main reasons customers would take their business elsewhere?
On a scale of 1–10, how personally accountable do you feel for ensuring the company creates value for its customers?
The room went quiet. Then came resistance, directed at me for asking such questions. Then finger‑pointing across the table. One senior leader, responsible for procurement, put it bluntly:
“Well, clearly, customer-centricity is not my job.”
That sentence tells you everything.
Strategy is a set of choices, not slogans
Customer-centricity is not about rolling out the red carpet for everyone. It is about clear choices:
Which customer segments are truly most valuable to us, and why?
Where can we create significantly more value for them than competitors can?
What are we willing to stop doing, or do less well for other segments, to free up resources for those customers?
If your top 50 leaders cannot name your five most valuable customers and articulate why they matter, you do not have a customer strategy. You have a slogan.
And if leaders in critical functions—procurement, finance, IT, HR—believe customer value is “not their job,” your operating model is designed to optimize internal convenience, not customer outcomes.
Behavior is the strategy
Intentions do not move customers. Behaviors do.
Customer-centricity stays corporate fluff until the most senior leaders live it daily. That means:
Allocating time and attention like it matters: regular customer conversations, reviewing customer‑level economics, and making those discussions central in leadership meetings.
Aligning incentives and KPIs so that support functions are explicitly measured on how they enable customer value, not just internal efficiency.
Making trade‑offs visible: saying “no” to initiatives that dilute focus from your most valuable customers, even when they are politically convenient.
Owning accountability personally: answering “What did I do this week to create more value for our key customers?” without deflecting to other functions or programs.
If you are not willing to change how you spend your time, how you measure success, and what you say “no” to, then customer centricity is not a real strategic choice. It is a hope.
The mirror test for executives
Before you finalize your 2027 strategy, run this mirror test with your executive committee:
Can each of you name the five most valuable customers and explain, in business terms, why they matter?
Can you describe two concrete ways your own decisions and behaviors in the last month created more value for those customers, or got in the way?
Are your function’s KPIs and resource allocations explicitly tied to creating value for those customers, not just to internal targets?
If the answers are fuzzy, do not blame the market, the talent pool, or IT delivery. The gap is not in the plan. It is in the habits.
What your leaders do, your customers feel
We all want to contribute to something bigger, work that meaningfully improves customers’ lives. But intention without habit is just noise.
Customer-centricity becomes real when the people at the top change what they do, not just what they say. When they align their calendars, their metrics, and their trade‑offs with the customers who matter most.
Because in the end, the market does not reward your strategy deck. It rewards your daily behavior.
What your leaders do, your customers feel