The reality of today’s landscape is your customer is overwhelmed with choice. Brand loyalty is lower than ever and switching to competitors is getting easier and easier – Facebook recently learned this the hard way after it showed negative user growth for the first time ever and lost $250bn dollars of value in the process.

Customer experience (CX) is the most important thing any organisation needs to be obsessing about to compete, grow and even survive. Everything from systems and communications to processes and proposition needs to be created with CX technology at the very heart of the business.

For most of us, we can’t build an entire ecosystem ourselves so choosing the right partners who can integrate seamlessly enabling the CX you want to create for your business is mission critical.

When assessing the market for partners you’ll find two kinds of businesses, on the one hand are those that are largely product siloed and use technology to automate traditional processes. These firms will essentially take the same arduous paper processes customers used to fulfil and digitise them without any thought as to how they will intertwine into the CX you’re developing to accelerate your business.

This is then often supported by sub-standard API integrations making your CX slow, fragmented and clunky – a recipe to send your clients elsewhere.

On the other hand are the true technology companies that have learned the above approach isn’t good enough, nor the way forward, because CX is not being seen as the most important single element of your development. It’s these firms that are focussed on coding new solutions and have been able to understand how to embed a culture of customer centricity using technology and data that are outperforming their peers.

So when you’re looking for potential partners, it’s vital to assess if organisations you could partner with for technology, culturally embrace customer centricity principles and place CX at the heart – or is it simply used as a tag line? Culture is the key.

Those that do embed CX culture are the businesses that are led by the engine room, not from the boardroom. It’s the individuals that are on the front-line within an organisation that are experiencing the live customer feedback and are working daily to solve problems, who will not only know where to focus the business but will also often come up with the best solutions and are empowered to make decisions.

The leadership team should be there to orchestrate the direction, reward bold thinking and be responsible for setting the boundaries – that is how true customer centricity is achieved.

When firms are choosing their business partners of the future it’s vital to assess who has built customer centricity and not just technology, and who is driven by a talented and trusted empowered team, as they will be the ones thinking outside the box to create progressive solutions that work for your customers.