Who really needs a customer-centric strategy, anyway? Clearly, you don’t. But how can you be sure you’re not kowtowing to customers? This list, polled from our guru panel and other experts, can help you make sure you keep all talk of strategy and customer-centricity at bay.

A growing number of businesses in the United Kingdom are adding executive positions overseeing CRM, according to a TotalDM survey of the United Kingdom’s top 500 companies. Writes TotalDM’s Andy Wood, this finding shows a strong commitment to customer relationship management.

How do you build a better candy bar? You start by building a better organization, based on teamwork. Ken Wells knows this from personal experience. Too often, he writes, organizations that are striving to be customer-centric ignore a critical component: aligning the people in the organization to the strategy.

You could develop the greatest CRM strategy in the history of the species, but if you fail to communicate it, it don’t matter—to writer Paul Greenberg or anyone else.

If your business is like others, your CEO and several close associates hole up in a comfortable spot where they can play golf one day and ski the next and then emerge from the sauna with a new strategies. There’s a better way, writes Dick Lee.