Pulling the Right Levers to Enable Customer Centricity: The Role of Organizational Architecture

Abstract

This paper investigates the crucial role of a firm’s organizational architecture in enabling customer centricity. We first summarize the literature in both marketing and accounting that examined the relationships among different elements of an organizational architecture with regard to customer centricity. We then provide the results of an online survey conducted among a sample of subscription-based companies that builds upon extant gaps in the literature. Our exploratory findings reveal that the availability of innovative customer metrics (such as Customer Lifetime Value) is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a customer-centric strategy to deliver higher levels of performance. The samples firms appear above all to suffer from a weak integration between Marketing and Accounting & Finance functions, also due to a limited adoption of customer metrics in incentive and compensation systems. Our study documents that firms need to pull the right levers of their organizational architectures if they intend to fully exploit customer centricity.

Keywords: customer centricity, customer accounting, customer lifetime value, customer equity, organizational architecture, management accounting