We help top management lead an organization where customers grow.
What your leaders do, your customers feel.
Customer focus starts at the top and cascades to every team. When leadership loses that focus, customers will feel it. And eventually, your bottom line too.
We partner with mid-market European companies whose leaders recognize that customer value reflects how they lead—and are driven to raise the bar.
Our 14-week signature program turns customer-first leadership from aspiration to daily habit, designed around three questions your leadership team will answer and act on together.
1
Where does your leadership team—often the company’s top 50—stand on customer-first leadership?
2
Which root causes keep your leaders from consistently displaying customer-first leadership behavior?
3
What actions do we envision and implement to make customer-first leadership the way you operate every day?
What do you gain from working with Cleo Felix?
Every leader knows exactly what to stop, start, and continue.
Your top 50 stop guessing. Each leader sees which of their behaviors create customer value, which stand in the way, and which few changes matter most. That clarity taps into each leader's own ambition and commitment to grow.
Your executive committee acts on evidence to enable customer-first leadership, not anecdote.
Debates about why customer-first behavior stalls end. The executive committee shares one validated understanding of the root causes across the company, and the conviction to act on them.
Customer results improve, and you can prove why.
Obstacles to customer-first leadership get removed through solutions your own leaders designed and your executive committee chose. The change is owned instead of imposed. The effect shows up where it counts: in customer metrics. And you stay in control: you can keep measuring the link between leadership behavior and customer value, recognize progress, and act where needed.
Why do clients call us?
Customer metrics slide. Growth stalls, satisfaction drops, churn rises. The numbers indicate that customers feel something has changed, and the fixes so far have not reversed the trend.
Working across silos gets harder. Decisions that span functions take too long. KPIs are siloed and point inward, creating tension across the board. And with no shared understanding of who the most valuable customers are, every debate about resources drags on.
Leadership development is on the agenda. The company wants to invest in the growth of its most senior leaders. But the available programs overemphasize training sessions and fail to start with customers in mind, positioning leadership as a goal rather than a means to create customer value.
Most companies have already tried something. A customer experience program. A town hall gathering on the importance of cross-silo collaboration. A workshop on customer-first leadership. These initiatives change what leaders hear, but they do not change what leaders do.
All three situations share the same root: the daily behavior of the most senior leaders. That is where Cleo Felix works.
To make customer value the company-wide North Star, we built a 14-week evidence-based program that focuses on finding practical leadership solutions from the start.
A global food and beverage manufacturer came to us after sales leaders flagged a drop in customer retention. Early interviews across the value chain pointed to a much-needed reframe of the issue: from below-par customer experience to a company-wide leadership challenge.
What the data revealed
We gathered multi-source data, including 360 survey results, 1:1 interviews with customers, leaders, and employees, team observations, and internal strategy documents, to understand where leadership stood and what was holding it back. Four root causes emerged:
KPIs that pulled attention inward. Especially support-function metrics pulled attention away from creating customer value, making it difficult for team leaders to connect the day-to-day with the company’s bigger picture.
A culture where mistakes were costly. Leaders held a social norm that mistakes were to be avoided at all costs, creating little appetite for teams to envision breakthrough innovations for their customers that might fail at first.
Decisions driven by internal logic. Across virtually every level, decision-making defaulted to internal criteria rather than customer needs.
Market intelligence that didn't travel. Customer satisfaction and other market data existed but rarely reached teams deeper inside the organization, who could make an actual difference.
From diagnosis to action
During a full-day session, the company's top 50 worked in small teams to prototype solutions targeting each root cause. The group selected the three most promising proposals and prepared a formal pitch for the executive committee — who signed off on all three, creating both legitimacy and resources for implementation.
The outcome
Six months later: churn had stopped. Early signals point to a significant increase in customer retention.
See the detailed overview of our evidence-based, 14-week, 5-step program.
The impact of customer-centricity is powerful, and can be quantified.
Customer-centric companies consistently outperform their peers. This is a measurable fact, backed by decades of research across thousands of companies.
A customer-centric company does two things well: it knows exactly who its most valuable customers are, and it operates so that every employee, not just sales or service, helps create customer value every day.
2.5× revenue growth
Companies reporting a “very mature” level of customer-centricity experienced 2.5X revenue growth compared with those reporting a “very immature” level (California Management Review).
Business value up 28%
Even a 5% increase in customer retention—driven by more satisfied customers—can increase a business's value by 28%, because the value of loyal customers compounds over time (Journal of Marketing).
Customer satisfaction predicts return on assets
Across 25 studies and nearly 14,000 companies, customer satisfaction correlates 0.22 with return on assets—meaning companies with more satisfied customers consistently generate more profit from the same resource base (Marketing Letters).
The challenge is to start with a shared and clear understanding of what customer-centricity actually means.
Customer-centricity is a concept often misunderstood.
Unfortunately, customer-centricity is too often mistaken for rolling out the red carpet for everyone who walks in. Aiming to deliver a five-star experience across the board would rapidly drain your company's limited resources.
Customer-centricity is, rather, about recognizing who your most valuable customers are, and then creating value for them with laser focus. A specific customer segment—or segments—where your company can deliver significantly more value than competitors. That’s why we refer to it as ‘competitive customer value’, recognizing that customer-centricity is a two-way street where both your customers and your company benefit in the long term.
A useful way to initiate a dialogue on the true meaning of customer-centricity might be to poll your team on two statements:
In this team, we have a clear and shared understanding of who the company’s valuable customers are;
In this team, we align the vast majority of our resources to create value for those valuable customers, directly or indirectly.
As your company grows, it becomes increasingly difficult to keep customers at the center of day-to-day decision-making.
“Customer value is on the first slide of our strategy deck. But I struggle to build a culture where every division and team actually lives it, every day.”
—CEO, specialty chemicals company, Switzerland
“We host brainstorm sessions to innovate for the customer. But in those sessions, the customer's actual needs are rarely what drives the conversation.”
—COO, building company, Germany
“Senior leaders can apply for training on customer-centricity. But back on the floor, they find that the obstacles to actually applying it are very real.”
—CHRO, brewing company, Denmark
Customer-centric leadership is not a vague concept. It’s tangible, measurable, and above all, it can be developed.
We define customer-centric leadership as: A coherent set of behaviors that guide the organization to create competitive customer value.
But how do you measure it? We built the CF15™—a science-grade survey that measures 15 specific leadership behaviors across five key clusters. Rather than testing abstract theories, the CF15 looks at hard behavioral metrics: from how your leaders seek market intelligence and redesign operational workflows to how they build cross-functional resilience and balance shareholder value with customer impact.
Our 14-week program uses a multi-source diagnostic approach. Alongside the CF15 survey, we conduct 1:1 interviews with leaders, employees, and customers, observe teams directly, and analyze internal strategy documents.
We collect this data because measuring leadership behavior isn't enough; to transform it, you have to understand what drives it. This rigorous process isolates the exact friction points holding your leaders back, giving you clear insights to envision and implement change where needed.
Featured blog posts
How can you measure customer-centric leadership?
15 items that capture leadership behavior.
Five things customer-centric leaders do when running a meeting.
The meeting habits you can sharpen today.
Before you launch your change initiative, do a premortem.
What I learned from doing 50 of them.