Executives with customer experience: wish and reality – the mantra of customer orientation

Purpose – This paper aims to describe the gap between the “customer orientation” as generally pretended by corporate top executives, and the actual focus of their respective officer mandates. It also aims to outline an alternative scenario in which “each and every executive board member is directly responsible for a given customer group or sales area”. Design/methodology/approach – This study analyzes the mandates of all executive board members of the 100 corporations stock-listed in Germany and Switzerland at DAX, MDAX and SMI index (as per annual reports and corporate homepages, on May 17, 2013). This study assumes that if customer orientation is a corporate core principle, then all officers will spend significant time with direct customer interaction and will have explicit responsibility for customers, sales markets or regions. Findings – Only about half of the analyzed (approximately 700) chief officers are directly responsible for sales markets or key accounts. The remaining half, instead, is heading mainly “functional” divisions (e.g. technology, legal). The proposed alternative scenario is outlined with its major practical implications. Practical implications – This study assumes that responsibility for client satisfaction and commercial success is systematically spread across all executive board members. Then corporate strategies are, by default, customer-oriented. Top management’s first-hand qualified customer experience helps them sizing their functional strategies. Such optimized functional strategies support the company’s market success – far from being trapped by silo mentality, or from becoming a goal in itself. Originality/value – This study approximates the ambivalence of “customer orientation” in real business practice as opposed to wish, and shifts responsibility to all top executives for putting credible customer orientation into practice.