In 1909 the entrepreneur Harry Gordon Selfridge opened the London department store Selfridge & Co. with the words “The customer is always right”. Ever since then, companies have religiously pursued this guiding principle, and every service provider has doubtless encountered it at some time during their career.

Nevertheless, we’re all aware of firms that can never be reached on the phone and don’t react to emails either. Then there are service providers that have never taken customer feedback to heart and have instead prioritized their own satisfaction over that of their customers. Yet even though more than 100 years have passed since the opening of Selfridge & Co., satisfying its customers should still be the most important goal of any company. Anyone who is completely enthusiastic about a product or service or the level of customer care they receive is most likely to recommend the company. This makes it all the more vital for companies to focus on satisfying their customers since they will ultimately forfeit any right to exist if the latter aren’t happy.

This is where Customer Metrics has a role to play. With Custopia, Customer Metrics has created a platform upon which companies’ customer centricity can be measured. In order to achieve this, one firstly needs to look at the experiences of one’s own employees: how do they rate the way in which their own company deals with its customers? And to what extent do employees have a say when it comes to satisfying them?

The Customer Centricity Score (CC-Score) can be calculated via a representative survey of every employee within the company – and by comparing positive and negative responses to a scientifically based set of questions on a scale of -100 (averse) to +100 (centered). This survey clearly stands out from other ways of measuring which are currently in common use and which in each case only scratch the surface of issues relating to customer orientation.

The CC-Score is complemented by the Customer Impact Score (CI-Score) which is the external counterpart to this, consisting of ratings from customers themselves. These two metrics are ultimately compared in order to determine whether customers’ actual experiences tally with the internal assessment of how customer-centered the company is.

The gathering of this data represents the first empirically developed indicator that reveals the level of customer centricity. In other words: Customer Metrics has for the first time created a tool that shows how customer-centered a company is. Answering this question will benefit customers, and receiving a positive verdict is something that ought to be indispensable for companies in the future.