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I know this situation well. The CX team is poring over survey results, NPS has dropped for the second quarter running, and when you go to discuss it with the product or finance department, you’re met with polite indifference. “That’s your problem.” The customer is simply the concern of whoever happens to talk to them. Everyone else has different KPIs.
But customer experience isn’t created in the contact centre. It’s shaped by decisions made in rooms the customer never enters — in pricing meetings, product design sessions, process reviews, software procurement. If those decision-making processes ignore the customer, no amount of agent training or customer service lines will fix it.
The data on this is consistent. According to a 2024 XM Institute survey of 234 CX professionals from companies with over a thousand employees, 71% of organisations remain stuck in the first two stages of CX maturity — the phase where leadership doesn’t yet see CX as a strategic opportunity. Only 2% of companies have reached the highest stage, where customer-centricity is genuinely embedded in the organisation’s DNA (XM Institute, State of CX Management, 2024). The paradox is plain to see: every company talks about the customer, but very few actually mean it.
Making the customer visible where they’re invisible
The biggest obstacle to a CX culture isn’t a lack of data. It’s a lack of contact. A developer who has never spoken to a customer designs differently from one who spends an hour each quarter listening to calls. A financial analyst who has never read a verbatim complaint will more readily approve a decision that makes life harder for the customer.
The solution isn’t revolutionary. It’s ritualistic.
Schneider Electric in North America opens its company meetings by sharing a customer story or piece of feedback before moving on to the numbers (Jeff Toister, How to Reinforce Your Service Culture with Rituals, 2023). It sounds trivial. But regular repetition changes what people perceive as important. The customer becomes present even in rooms where they’re physically absent.
A similar approach involves structured “listen sessions” playing back customer calls or reading open-ended survey responses with people from outside the customer-facing teams: product managers, marketers, IT architects. Once a month. For an hour. With no agenda to solve anything just to listen. In practice, it looks like this: you come to the session, you’re given three transcribed calls or ten NPS comments, and you talk through what you’re hearing as a group. No PowerPoints. No filtering by the CX team. Just the raw voice of the customer.
This approach also has an unexpected side effect: involving employees outside the frontline in customer feedback naturally increases their sense of accountability for the customer experience. According to Forrester Research, employees who are actively engaged in Voice of Employee (VoE) programmes feel a significantly stronger sense of direct influence over how customers experience the brand (InMoment, Voice of Employee, 2022).
Dashboards that people actually read
Live CX dashboards are a great thing. The trouble is, most of them exist to give the CX team something to show at the quarterly review and then go dark.
A functional dashboard doesn’t just need to exist; it needs to be built into the working rhythm of people who don’t have “CX” in their job title.
That means:
- data segmented by team or product area (a product team wants to see feedback on their product, not the company-wide aggregated NPS)
- automated alerts when there’s a significant drop
- and above all, clear ownership of what the numbers mean and what someone is going to do about them
In its approach to CX transformation, Bain & Company emphasises that a functioning customer culture depends on connecting customer data to business outcomes retention, pricing, cross-selling. Only then does customer data stop being “a CX thing” and become a company-wide concern (Bain & Company, Customers Want Relationships, Not Just Easy Experiences, 2025).
This is a mistake nearly everyone makes: the CX team monitors customer metrics in isolation, rather than distributing them as a shared responsibility.
Leadership: this can’t be delegated
I recently spoke with a CX manager at a mid-size e-commerce company. She described a situation that, in my experience, is very common: “We have full support from the CEO in words. In practice, we can see that customer data isn’t discussed at leadership level. It’s just an appendix to the annual report.”
Culture isn’t built through declarations. It’s built through what leadership does and what it tolerates.
In its research on customer-centric organisations, Gartner stresses that senior leaders must actively and visibly participate in customer programmes whether that means attending Voice of Customer (VoC) sessions or ensuring that customer data is part of strategic planning, not just reporting (Gartner, Customer Experience Primer for 2025). In other words: if the CEO doesn’t show up to a listen session, everyone else gets the message that the customer isn’t a priority.
Leadership also signals its priorities through how it responds to poor customer results. If NPS or CSAT scores are uncomfortable and leadership dismisses them or raises methodological objections rather than looking for answers, the whole organisation learns that customer feedback is an awkward formality. But if leadership comes to a meeting asking “what are our customers telling us, and what are we going to do about it?” that changes the entire language of the organisation.
Measuring CX culture maturity and moving it forward
This is the part the CX community tends to skip over. Culture can’t be built without measurement. It sounds cynical, but it’s true: what isn’t measured carries no weight in an organisation.
The XM Institute offers a five-stage CX Maturity Model: Investigate, Initiate, Mobilize, Scale, and Embed. Their 2023 survey showed that 7 in 10 organisations sit at the first two levels (XM Institute, 2023). The highest level Embed describes a state where customer-centricity is genuinely woven into everyday decisions at every level of the company, including strategic planning and HR processes.
In practice, here’s what to focus on when assessing your own cultural maturity:
First, the customer’s presence in decision-making. Is customer data part of regular leadership meetings? Is it accessible to people outside the CX team? If not, you’re most likely still at the Investigate or Initiate stage.
Second, shared accountability for customer metrics. Do teams outside customer care have their own customer-related goals? Or is NPS the exclusive concern of the customer department? Organisations at higher maturity levels assign customer KPIs to product, marketing, and finance teams as well.
Third, the response to customer incidents. How does the company react when a customer has a poor experience? Is it treated as “a CX thing,” or is it escalated to a cross-functional team? The speed and breadth of the response is a telling indicator of cultural maturity.
Gartner’s CX maturity model adds another dimension: the link between customer strategy and innovation. At the highest level, organisations don’t just respond to customer needs they anticipate them and design products and processes around them before the customer has even articulated what they want (Gartner, Use Gartner’s Maturity Model to Evolve Your Customer Experience, 2024).
Moving up even one level in CX cultural maturity isn’t just a matter of perception, either CX leaders at higher maturity levels demonstrate measurably better business results. According to XM Institute, they are 63% more likely (compared to 40% of CX laggards) to be rated as companies with above-market financial performance (XM Institute, State of CX Management, 2024).
Culture isn’t installed. It’s cultivated.
It sounds like a cliché, but practice confirms it every day. A CX culture that runs across the whole organisation isn’t a project with a delivery date. It’s a collection of habits, rituals, decisions, and behaviours ones that are either repeated, or aren’t.
The best tools, the best metrics, the best customer platform in the world won’t help if your colleague in product has never heard a customer speak. If no one at the leadership meeting asks what customers are saying. If the CX team is sitting alone in the corner watching its own dashboards.
The customer needs to be present in rooms they’ll never actually enter. That’s the work of CX culture. And that work doesn’t start with technology it starts with who gets the floor at the next all-hands meeting.
