#114 - Bringing Customers Back to the Heart of Business - with Helge Tennø

In a world where products and organizational design often take centre stage, Helge Tennø —a long-time strategist and innovation advisor focused on customer-centric transformations— makes the case for redefining and delivering customer value.

In this episode, he challenges the conventional reliance on engagement and sales metrics and highlights the importance of measuring real customer value, driving behavioural and strategic change - thus linking customer impact directly to business success.

Using a customer-centric four-stack framework that aligns Experience, Data, Strategy, and Culture, he offers a wealth of insights on rethinking organizational design and navigating the future of AI-driven customer experiences.

As a prolific writer and practitioner voicing customer-centricity for over two decades, Helge has guided several organizations worldwide in creating meaningful value for customers.

In this conversation, he helps us visualize what it means to step out of purely product-centric perspectives, outdated measurement systems, and rigid internal structures.

Taking real-world examples, he explores how organizations can build a clear chain of measurement, tracking the real impact of engagement, behavioural shifts, and ultimately, business value.

This episode is not missing, as we also touch upon the future of customer centricity, which breaks free from traditional customer journeys – and captures the complexity, helping organizations become intuitive and human-centred.

Key Highlights
👉 Customer-centricity is not just a mindset shift but a structural transformation, requiring organizations to embed customer needs into strategy, measurement, and ways of working.
👉 Traditional customer journeys often fail to capture complexity—organizations can instead explore designs that suit their specific requirements and aid their decision-making.
👉 Ownership in a customer-centric organization must evolve—teams should focus on owning customer outcomes rather than just products to drive meaningful impact.
👉 Rethinking measurement is crucial—organizations must stop assuming that more engagement equals success and start tracking behavioural change and long-term value creation.
👉 AI and modularization will redefine customer interactions, potentially enabling customers to self-configure their own experiences—but most businesses lack the right data to support this shift.
👉 Innovation should be embedded within daily operations, rather than being treated as a separate function or ceremonial event, to drive continuous transformation at scale.

Topics /chapters
(00:00) Bringing Customers Back to the Heart of Business
(00:56) Introducing Helge
(03:41) The importance of being a customer-centric organization
(06:37) Key Elements of a Customer Centric Transformation
(09:54) Line of Sight between Employees and Value
(13:57) Evaluating True Value
(17:15) Orchestrating Business Value in Complexity
(21:59) Driving Ownership in a Customer-Centric Organization
(26:44) Enabling Customer Based Metric System
(30:44) Technology and Modern Tool Integrations for Data Analysis
(34:57) AI and customers self-designing their experiences
(44:50) What’s the space for simplicity, aesthetics, and design?
(49:15) What’s the rebundling that’s going to put customers in the center?
(53:19) Keeping Leaders Grounded in the Chaos
(57:32) Breadcrumbs and Suggestions

Remember that you can always find transcripts and key highlights of the episode on our website: https://www.boundaryless.io/podcast/tenno-helge

Episode recorded on Jan 21, 2025

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