Why Organisations Say They’re Customer-Centric, But Can’t Measure Customer Friction
- Max Bowen
- 5 days ago
- 3 min read
There’s a quiet paradox sitting inside almost every large organisation today. A strange tension between aspiration and reality.
If you listen closely, you’ll hear versions of it everywhere:
“We want to become truly customer-centric.” “We’re putting the customer at the centre.” “Our strategy starts with the customer.”
It’s the corporate mantra of the decade.
But then you look beneath the language…and something doesn’t add up.
Because while most organisations can articulate the category of customer pain (churn, delay, dissatisfaction, abandonment) very few can measure the friction itself.
Not in real-time. Not with consistency. And not at the level of resolution needed to change behaviour.
And that gap, between stated ambition and instrumentation reality, is quietly costing organisations speed, money, trust, and strategic clarity.
Let’s break it down.
1. The illusion of being “customer-centric”
Over the past 10 years, nearly every strategy deck has a slide titled Customer First. Most boards discuss customer obsession. Every transformation program claims to improve customer experience.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth:
You can’t be customer-centric if you can’t measure customer friction.
And most teams can’t.
They track proxy signals:
NPS (lagging)
Surveys (selective)
Complaints (reactive)
Churn (too late)
CSAT (broad, imprecise)
Useful? Sure. Sufficient? Absolutely not.
None of those tell you where friction happens, why it happens, or how often it happens.
One executive put it bluntly:
“It’s wild, we know the biggest pain point…but we don’t collect any data on the pain point itself.”
This isn’t a technology gap. It’s a visibility gap. A resolution gap. A systems-designed-for-2014-supporting-customers-who-live-in-2025 gap.
2. The truth: customer friction hides in the micro-moments
Customer friction rarely lives in the big metrics.
It lives in the steps between the steps.
The 17-second delay between screens.
The unclear status update.
The request that asks for information you already provided.
The call transfer that causes the customer to start again.
The silent queue in a digital form where the user drops out.
These micro-frictions define the actual customer experience.
But here’s the problem:
Most organisations don’t instrument the micro-moments.
They measure the outcome, not the interaction. The category, not the event. The story, not the signal.
If you think of customer experience like a map, most companies have a continent-level view, when what they actually need is street-level.
3. Why this happens: the “insight supply chain” is broken
Through dozens of conversations with strategy and experience leaders, we see the same structural issues:
Fragmented data flows Sales owns one set.Ops owns another. Digital owns another. Contact centres own another. No single, shared truth.
Legacy instrumentation Systems were designed for process completion, not friction detection.
Proxy-driven culture Leaders use broad metrics that don’t translate to actionable behaviour.
Poor experience governance Nobody has clear accountability for measuring friction, only for fixing it once it becomes a headline.
Misaligned investment logic Data quality and instrumentation are treated as costs — not strategic enablers.
The outcome?
Companies declare customer centricity, but their systems don’t actually see the customer.
4. The organisations getting this right do three things differently
After speaking with leaders across retail, banking, government, telco and health, the pattern is clear.
They instrument the journey, not the outcome
They measure:
drop-off points
dwell time
error loops
rework
repeat touchpoints
sentiment shifts
process restarts
channel switching in real-time
One bank now tracks “effort spikes” in every digital and physical interaction.It changed the way they deploy capital.
They build shared friction dashboards, not departmental metrics
The best dashboards aren’t pretty.They’re honest.
Everyone sees:
the same pain points
the same choke points
the same hotspots
They tie friction to resource allocation
This is the unlock.
Friction becomes a funding signal. Less conversation. More action.
If friction rises, resources move. If friction drops, resources stay. Simple. Transparent. Strategic.
5. Three questions for strategy leaders this week
If you want to understand your organisation’s true customer-centricity, ask:
Can we measure friction at the level our customers feel it?
Not at the level our systems report it.
Do we collect data on the customer pain points we already know exist? Surprisingly few do.
Who owns friction measurement, and who uses it to make decisions?
Ownership determines visibility.Visibility determines action.
Where this is heading
Customer-centricity is no longer a philosophy.It’s an instrumentation problem. A data design problem. A leadership problem.
The organisations that win won’t be the ones with the best slogans or the most polished journey maps.
They’ll be the ones who can see friction with precision. Measure it consistently. And allocate capital to remove it, fast.
Because in a world of rising expectations and AI-amplified competition, the companies that reduce friction the fastest will pull away from the pack.
Not because they care more. But because they see more.
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