Over the past two years, Align Technology has been on a journey to become truly customer obsessed. While customer-centricity has long been a stated value for many organizations, embedding it deeply and sustainably across teams, operations, and leadership takes deliberate effort and a willingness to evolve. At Align, we’ve made meaningful progress by rethinking how we listen, lead, and act on customer feedback, with a focus on what it takes to deliver exceptional experiences at every touchpoint.
This journey is far from over. True customer obsession is not a fixed destination. It’s a mindset and a commitment to continuously improve. Our approach has already delivered tangible results, including a considerate increase in our Net Promoter Score (NPS), which indicates a measurable shift in how customers feel about their experience with us. While we are proud of this progress, we know there’s a lot more we can do as an organization to get better and create more exceptional experiences for our customers.
So, what does it take to put customer obsession into practice? Here’s how we’ve approached the challenge at Align and what others can learn from our experience.
A willingness to collect all feedback
It’s important to us that we access and aggregate every bit of customer feedback we receive – from surveys and Salesforce interactions to customer panels and in-field customer visits. Accessing as much feedback as possible is fundamental to the organization to ensure we are aware of what our customers need and want.
Being customer obsessed starts with listening but listening in a way that’s intentional and actionable. Instead of relying solely on annual surveys – where we typically receive tens of thousands responses every year – we’ve also invested in live and continuous feedback channels that allow us to hear from customers in real time and enable us to respond more effectively.
Every quarter, we run several customer panels across each of our regions, deep diving into the challenges our customers face and co-creating solutions together. These forums are more than just box-ticking exercises. They are spaces where we get to the heart of friction points, challenge assumptions, and explore opportunities to make interactions smoother and more rewarding.
In addition, dedicated platforms allow us to gather and analyze thousands of pieces of customer feedback annually, helping us to better understand what customers are saying and why they feel the way they do. These insights guide both tactical changes and long-term improvements, providing us with a fuller picture of what matters most to our customers.
Acting with purpose
Listening without action is a missed opportunity. One of the key lessons we’ve learned is the importance of turning insight into improvement quickly and deliberately. Our initiative, called “Order to Cash” is one example of how we’re doing this at scale. By taking a comprehensive look at the entire customer journey, from placing an order to receiving payment, we’ve identified key pain points and streamlined processes to reduce complexity and enhance the overall experience. These kinds of cross functional projects may seem operational on the surface, but they are deeply rooted in the customer perspective. What does ease look like for them and how can we deliver it?
Over the last 12 months, we have also undertaken other initiatives to improve the customer experience across EMEA. Our continuous improvement team plays a crucial role in driving meaningful changes that can benefit our customers. It’s also important that these types of improvements aren’t one-off fixes. Instead, they should be part of an ongoing rhythm of change that keeps the organization aligned with the evolving expectations of its customers.
Embedding a customer-first culture
Customer obsession can’t live in a single department; it needs to be part of the organization’s DNA. At Align, we’ve focused on embedding a customer-first mindset into our culture by linking it directly to how we hire, train, and empower our teams.
A great example of this mindset in action is CX Week - a dedicated activity across the whole EMEA region where we take the time to listen to customer needs and challenge ourselves to consider how we can act differently, both as individuals and as an organization, to improve the experience for customers. We also just launched the CARE Recognition Program, which highlights individuals and teams who live our customer values at the highest level. Finally, we are partnering heavily with our HR team and leadership team to ensure our customer-first culture is truly embedded, making it clear to our whole organization that the customer is central to our strategy.
Our internal engagement data now shows that being "customer-led" is the highest scoring area of our culture. By creating a culture that encourages everybody to listen to our customers and build their feedback into decision-making, we stand a greater chance of achieving our mission.
Driving change from the top
Cultural change doesn’t happen without leadership. One of the most important accelerators of our progress has been the engagement of our senior leaders in the customer experience agenda. Over the past year, we’ve trained 80 percent of our senior executives on the principles of customer obsession. This training has helped them to view the Align experience through the eyes of our customers while equipping them to model the right behaviors. This level of engagement ensures that customer thinking isn’t just a frontline concern, it’s embedded in strategic decisions, investments, and priorities at the highest levels of the company. When leaders champion the customer, everyone else follows suit.
Continuous improvement as a core discipline
Customer obsession isn’t about perfection, it’s about progression. At Align, we see every customer insight as an opportunity to improve, and every improvement as a step toward a stronger relationship. That philosophy has helped us turn feedback loops into a source of competitive advantage and reframe experience management as a key business discipline.
We’re proud of the progress we’ve made so far, but we’re even more excited about what comes next. Because the more we learn from our customers, the better we can serve them and the stronger our business becomes as a result.
In today’s competitive landscape, "good" isn’t good enough. Companies that truly commit to customer obsession, who listen actively, act boldly, and lead with empathy are not only raising the bar for customer experience but creating meaningful value for their customers and their business.
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