Customer Obsession Is a Liability Now
You can’t call yourself customer obsessed if you’re only obsessed with their money.
Before we get into it:
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Just for Fun
Customer Obsession Is a Liability Now
My Observation
A pattern I’m seeing across companies right now.
The companies that talk most about customers are usually the worst at serving them.
You’ve been on hold so long you’ve choreographed three dance routines to the music. Meanwhile, their homepage says “customer-obsessed” and their CEO just posted about “putting people first.”
In the early 2000s, Amazon made “customer obsession” famous. But Amazon built a system behind it—Working Backwards—where every decision started with the customer and required operational proof. It wasn’t a value. It was an operating model.
Most companies copied the trend and skipped the infrastructure.
By 2024, “customer obsessed” was on every brand deck, every careers page, every investor pitch. Forrester looked at how many companies actually operationalized it. The number was 3%.
The other 97% put it on the wall and called it strategy.
You can’t call yourself customer obsessed if you’re only obsessed with their money.
What This Signals
Why it matters, and where things are headed.
We’re in an era where brand language has outpaced organizational capability.
“Customer obsessed.” “People first.” “Find your why.” The phrases travel. The discipline doesn’t. Companies are adopting values as vocabulary—not as operating systems.
And customers feel the gap. Every time they’re transferred to a fourth person. Every time “we value your feedback” leads nowhere. Every time the brand voice is warm and the experience is cold.
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They’re punishing it, too. The average company loses 17-30% of customers every year. Most of those customers told you they were leaving. You just weren’t set up to hear them. The problem isn’t the aspiration, it’s about the distance between what companies say and what their infrastructure is set up to deliver.
When pressure hits (a market shift, a leadership change, a crisis) that distance becomes visible and it’s sometimes fatal.
Your Decision Model
A simple framework to apply in your work.
So how do you know if you’re in the 3% or the 97%?
I built a 45-minute leadership workshop to stress-test it. Five exercises. Real evidence-gathering. A scoring system that tells you where your gaps are—before pressure exposes them for you.
Below is the full audit, plus the story of a company that named itself after its values and collapsed the moment pressure hit.
