How to build a customer centric culture: five steps from bosch and vkusvill

The disease every growing company catches

Last week I wrote about how Haier set out to escape that loop by going to Zero Distance. But I stopped at the diagnosis, and the direction. I never said how you actually get there.

This week I want to.

Because the big-company disease can be cured, and I have seen the cure at work in two companies that could not be more different.

One is more than 135 years old, German, and makes drills, saws and sanders. Around 20,000 people work in its Power Tools division alone. The other began with one man, $10,000 in savings, and a small dairy corner in a shopping mall. Today it is a $5 billion grocery business.

Bosch and VkusVill share almost nothing. Different countries. Different cultures. Different products. And yet both have embraced the Zero Distance philosophy that the ZeroDX awards celebrate, given to organizations that get closest to zero distance from the people they serve. Both escaped the bureaucratic loop Tateishi drew.

Both did it by building a customer centric culture that actually holds up under pressure.

Why most customer-centric models fall short

Most of the progressive management models you have heard about start on the inside.

They tell you precisely how decisions get made, how roles are governed, how the organization runs itself. Holacracy is the clearest example. Useful, but often inward-facing.

The problem is obvious once you name it. If your model begins with your own decision rights and role structures, the client shows up somewhere later in the chain. Sometimes much later.

A genuine customer centric culture runs the logic the other way. Outside-in. It begins with the client, and never loses sight of them. What does the client actually value? How does that value become a promise a named team is accountable for? And how does the money follow it?

That means the client sits at the start of the chain, not the end. Everything else is built backwards from there.

This is the instinct behind Haier's RenDanHeYi model. And it is exactly what set the transformation at Bosch Power Tools apart.

Clientocracy: a method that starts with the client

Together with Jochen Goeser, who led the five-year transformation of Bosch Power Tools, and Elena Aleshina and Sacha Bashkov from Beyond Taylor, the team that developed and codified the method behind VkusVill, I have been putting the shared cure into a whitepaper.

They call the method Clientocracy.

Clientocracy takes the outside-in instinct and turns it into a concrete, repeatable method. Roughly in five steps. What follows is a working guide to how a customer centric culture actually gets built, using the same steps both companies followed.

Five steps to build a customer centric culture

1. focus on clients, not bosses

The first step is to decide, concretely, who the organization is for.

That means naming the change you exist to bring about. Clientocracy calls this the evolutionary goal. VkusVill's is one line: healthy food for healthy eating, available to everyone.

Notice who this goal serves. Not the shareholders. Not the managers. Everyone who wants to eat well.

Then comes the harder work: understanding in real detail what your clients need. Clientocracy calls this the Key Client Value. It is not about what you assume clients need. It is about what actually hurts them, and what would remove that pain.

Everything that follows is built on top of that.

This is also what customer-centric means in practice. Not a slogan on the wall. A specific description of who you serve and what change you make in their life.

2. work with promises, not orders

In a bureaucratic company, work is coordinated by orders travelling down the hierarchy. In a Clientocracy, work is coordinated by a hierarchy of promises.

A team makes a specific promise to a specific client to deliver the Key Client Value. The moment it makes that promise, it gets the authority to keep it. And the responsibility to honour it.

Those promises stack into the real hierarchy of the company. Front-line teams make core promises to clients. Supporting teams promise the front line what it needs. And a few back-office teams make the general promises everyone relies on.

A simplified example. A team of cleaners makes a core promise to always have a clean uniform on the job. The facilities team makes a supporting promise to the cleaners that clean uniforms are always available. And the accounting team makes a general promise to everyone in the organization that salaries land on time.

Orders point up. Promises point out.

3. give real authority to the people who serve clients

A promise system only works if the people making promises have real decision-making power to honour them.

So the organization is rebuilt so that authority sits closest to the client. The pyramid gives way to a flat network of autonomous teams. It is the same structure we have written about for a decade, in most of the pioneering companies we follow, and the main thing we teach in our Corporate Rebels Masterclass.

What used to be the executive team becomes a management council. The people on that council no longer manage the work of others. They protect the client values, the promises, and the company's financial health, and make sure every team has what it needs to keep its word.

At VkusVill this is not theory. People at the store can resolve any customer complaint on the spot, with no escalation. They can adjust their own markdowns. They can reorder any item a customer asks for, then and there.

Five concrete examples of customer-focused behavior, all from VkusVill's shop floor:

Resolving a complaint on the spot, with no manager involved.

Adjusting markdowns based on what is happening in the store that day.

Reordering a product a customer asks for, without waiting for approval.

Feeding customer comments straight to the product teams who make the goods.

Running small experiments to see if the fix actually works.

The authority lives where the client is standing.

4. pay for value created, not for compliance

Authority without financial understanding is only half of autonomy.

A team needs to see the link between what the client pays and what it costs the team to deliver. So reward gets tied to client value created. Not to compliance followed. Not to a manager's subjective read.

Rewards are linked to the results of the whole team, and they are transparent to every member of it.

Pay stops being something that happens to people. It becomes something a team can see, understand, and influence. That, more than any values poster, is what a customer centric culture rests on. People own the outcome because they own the upside.

5. decide on data, not on feelings

The last step is what keeps the whole thing evolving.

Long-term plans give way to a stream of small, bounded experiments. A hypothesis. A time limit. A budget cap. Each one is tested cheaply first, so there is always something to learn. Only the experiments that prove themselves get scaled.

Feeding all of it is the client's voice, running straight through the operation.

At VkusVill that means roughly half a million customer comments every month, going directly to the people who make the product. Ask for a concrete example of customer centricity, and it is hard to beat that. Not a survey read by a manager six months later. Half a million pieces of feedback a month, in the hands of the teams who can act on it.

And when something breaks, and it will, the company borrows the black box principle from aviation. The point is not to find the pilot to blame. It is to find the fix that stops it from happening again.

Two companies, one cure

Two companies that could not be more different caught the same disease and cured it the same way.

Bosch Power Tools did it through a five-year transformation of an established division, led by Jochen Goeser. VkusVill did it by building the cure into its DNA when it started to scale, under founder Andrey Krivenko.

The five steps stay remarkably consistent, whichever company you look at. Country, culture, product, industry. All different. The method survives all of it.

But how you apply the steps is yours to discover. Clientocracy is a philosophy and a method, never a template.

Where to start

The five steps are sequential. The transformation is iterative. You begin with step 1, defining who you actually serve, and you build from there.

Andrey Krivenko asked himself a question when he started VkusVill. It is the same question worth sitting with now.

Who does our management structure actually serve?

If the honest answer is "management," you already know where to start.

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