Customer-Centric in Name Only? The Accountability Test
You can’t build a reputation on what you are going to do — Henry Ford
Everyone loves to talk about customer-centricity. It’s an easy rallying cry — who’s going to push back on “let’s be more customer-focused”? Almost no one.
But here’s the paradox: while it’s easy to agree with the sentiment, very few actually know how to make it real and create value with it. The path from good intentions to transformation is murky — littered with buzzwords, misaligned incentives, and good intentions gone stale.
That’s where The Digital Leader Newsletter comes in. We're not just cheering from the sidelines — we're giving you the actual playbook.
Customer-centricity isn’t a slogan. It’s not easy. It’s not clean. It’s not perfect. And most importantly, it doesn’t happen by accident. You need a framework — not just a strategy, but a culture shaped by clear principles. Call them tenets, call them guideposts — just don’t call them rigid rules. You’ll need flexibility, clarity, and intent.
Let’s start with one of the most misunderstood: accountability.
In one of my first newsletters, I shared a set of twenty-two candidate principles for customer-centricity. This wasn’t a recommendation to adopt all twenty-two, but rather a starting point — a comprehensive list designed to spark discussion and help you identify which principles best fit your organization’s goals and culture.
This set of principles is still a great read. It starts with the concept of “accountability”.
Principle #1: Accountability
“We take accountability for ensuring the realization of the full benefit of our customer’s use of our products or services.”
Explanation: We don’t deflect. We don’t pass the buck. We actively build strategies and bold plans to expand our reach and influence in service of that goal.
This week, we’re digging into Accountability — a deceptively simple principle that sits at the heart of any customer-centric strategy or culture.
The Weight of a Promise
What promise are you making to your customer?
Is it clear promise? Explicit in nature?
Do your customers know it — and do you?
Can you track it, measure it, manage to it?
And most crucially: Are you willing to be accountable for it?
When we say “ensuring the realization of customer benefit”, the word that often makes people squirm is “ensuring.” Some would prefer softer language — something like strive or hope. But ensuring implies something uncomfortable: commitment. It demands that we know the promise, deliver on it, and prove we delivered.
This is where accountability, as a principle, starts to bite.
To ensure customers achieve the promised value, a few things must be true — and they’re rarely trivial:
We must understand the customer’s context, needs, and usage in real detail.
We must make specific promises, not vague aspirations.
We must have the infrastructure to measure both our inputs (what we delivered) and the customer’s outcomes (what they gained).
That’s no small lift. But without it, accountability is performative — it lives in slide decks and mission statements, not in the customer experience.
What It Actually Means to Be Accountable
True accountability means someone owns the promise. Someone owns the outcomes.
And culturally, it means this: people feel both empowered and obligated to fix what isn’t working — even if it’s outside their department, job title, or formal control.
That’s real customer-centricity.
Not slogans. Not scorecards. A mindset and a mandate.
A Real-World Example: Amazon’s Perfect Order Promise
Let’s make this real.
Amazon uses a metric called Perfect Order Percentage (POP) — a direct expression of its accountability to customers. A “perfect order” means the customer got exactly what they expected, without any hiccups.
To qualify as a perfect order, sellers must process, fulfill, and deliver without:
Negative feedback
A-to-Z guarantee claims
Chargebacks
Cancellations
Late shipments
Refunds
Buyer-initiated messages
POP is calculated as: # of perfect orders ÷ total orders in 90 days
Amazon even adjusts for nuances (e.g., shoe returns are more common), but the bar stays high: a 95%+ POP score is expected.
This is what accountability looks like in practice:
concrete promises + defined measurement + category-aware nuance.
Making Accountability Real
If we want to live this principle, not just state it, we need real mechanisms — habits, tools, and expectations. Here are a few to start with:
List your promises. What specific commitments do you make to customers? Write them down.
Benchmark ruthlessly. What’s your actual performance against those promises today?
Plan aggressively. What new capabilities would radically improve your promise delivery? Prioritize and invest accordingly.
Refuse to deflect. “We don’t point fingers” means nobody gets to say, “Well, that’s not my department.” Get to Yes. Always.
Set the tone. Your internal comms and leadership voice must reinforce this mindset — especially with support orgs like Legal, HR, Ops, and Finance.
If accountability is just a personal trait, it fails. If it’s embedded in strategy, culture, and language — it scales.
Summary & Homework
If customer-centricity were a house, “accountability” would be the bedrock slab it’s built on.
Your homework:
Does your company make clear its customer commitments?
Are you delivering on them?
And — most painfully — how do you know? What are the measures?
If your gut reaction is, “Oh no... what have we actually committed to?” — that’s exactly the point.
Customer-centricity isn’t about tweaks. It’s a transformation. That means the future state must be boldly different — in mindset, behavior, and systems.
That’s what my books, The Amazon Way, Think Like Amazon & Big Bet Leadership are about — how do we use strategy, leadership, clarity of intent, metrics and several other levers to create & maintain competitive advantage.
Thanks for reading. If this sparked something, consider sharing this newsletter — and hit reply to let me know what this principle looks like (or fails to look like) in your org.
Onward!
John
About The Digital Leader Newsletter
This is a newsletter for change agents, strategists, and innovators. The Digital Leader Newsletter is a weekly coaching session focusing on customer-centricity, innovation, and strategy. We deliver practical theory, examples, tools, and techniques to help you build better strategies, better plans, and better solutions — but most of all, to think and communicate better.
John Rossman is a keynote speaker and advisor on leadership and innovation. Learn more at www.bookjohnrossman.com