Customer Centricity can be defined as putting the customer first, without forgetting your own interest.
Meaning that your action should all be focusing on: firstly making your customer happy (and paying), secondly making your customer recommend you (more paying customers) and finally making your customer help you to become even better (keep your customers).

Consequently, Customer Centricity is not only a marketing thing. It’s more a culture! It needs to start with changes on top management level. And subsequently it needs to reach every single person in contact with the customer or in charge of something the customer will see, feel, or hear. In other words, it needs to be lived by everybody in a company!

However, there is no black and white and interpretations are various.

Therefore I listed a few of the most relevant quotes regarding Customer Centricity:

„The aim of Customer Centricity: Focus on the Right Customers for Strategic Advantage.“
Peter Fader in „Customer Centricity“ (2012)

„Aligning the resources of [your organization] to effectively respond to the ever-changing needs of the customer, while building mutually profitable relationships.“
C. Bailey, K. Jensen in „Becoming Customer Centric: Finding the Voice of the Customer“ (2006)

„Customer centricity advocates valuing customers as a firm’s most important asset, one which needs to be acquired, developed, and cultivated to generate profit over the lifetime of their relationship with the company. „
S. Parniangtong in „Competitive Advantage of Customer Centricity“ (2017)

„Customer centricity incorporates ideas, approaches, strategies, and tactics which have evolved over time in alignment with different industries‘ customer-oriented intitiatives. All of these initiatives share on key notion: focusing operations around the company’s customers as a way to increase customer loyality, reduce churn and attrition, and increase revenues, resulting in the delivery of superior product and service to the customer community.“
D. Loshin, A. Reifer in „Using Information to Develop a Culture of Customer Centricity: Customer Centricity, Analytics, and Information Utilization“ (2013)

Some definitions, translated from German:

„Customer Centricity is all about putting the customer at the center of all activities and ideally increasing satisfaction and loyalty. An important point here is to know what wishes, needs and frustration points the customers have regarding their products or services.“
brandwatch.com

„1. customer centricity means to place each individual customer and his individual needs at the starting point of philosophy, vision, leadership, strategy, and implementation of the entire (!) company.
2. customer centricity requires that the (entrepreneurial) actions are individually aligned to each customer – whether to 100 or 40,000 customers.
3. customer centricity means that positioning, strategy, structure, organization, processes, behavior, etc. are completely focused on the individual customer.
4. customer centricity makes no difference between direct and indirect customers.
5. customer centricity naturally develops market services according to the wishes and needs of the customers [market services = products, services, financing, delivery accuracy, but also communication like consulting and advertising services, etc.].”
Wilkes & Stange in „Customer Centricity & Corporate Management“ (2013)

So, what is the learning?

In short: you must decide how deeply the customer-centric approach penetrates your organization!

More holistic approaches, integrating all departments, increase the likeliness of a real change towards higher customer satisfaction, higher turnover and increased margins.

Picture source: https://pixabay.com/de/users/madartzgraphics-3575871