Allianz Trade
Building customer-centric leadership at Allianz Trade
Allianz Trade's top leaders ran the culture change on themselves before asking a single team to try it. The board wanted to move faster and closer to the customer, and knew the shift had to start at the top. The regional CEO and his market heads went first.
Change by decree.
A culture takes its cues from what leaders do, more than from anything they announce. A board can call for customer-centricity, fund the program, and repeat it in every town hall, and still watch nothing move while the people setting the tone work the way they always have. At Allianz Trade, the leaders ran the business on internal targets and efficiency, and rarely heard from a customer firsthand. Asking the teams to put the customer first while the people at the top stayed a step removed was never going to land.
Bringing the customer to the leadership team.
The Forward Protocol made the leadership team the test subjects. A two-day kickoff turned a more customer-centric culture from a goal into experiments each leader ran on their own week first, then pushed into their teams and scaled where it worked. Each experiment did one job, bring the customer into the room where the leadership decides. Allianz scaled the first two below; the rest are the wider playbook the same protocol surfaces:
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The customer's NPS on the office screens
The leaders put the live customer NPS up on screens across the office, so the number the customer cares about was the one everyone walked past.
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Senior managers on live customer calls
Executives joined a regular cadence of real customer calls, hearing the people the company insures without a report in between, then brought what they heard back to the table.
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Every meeting opens with a customer
Leadership meetings start with one real customer story before any internal item, so the customer frames the decisions that follow.
Leaders model customer-first, then scale what works.
Change by mandate.
Years tuned for predictability.
Leaders far from the customer.
Customer-first is the leadership default.
Live NPS on the office screens, and senior managers on customer calls.
80% of leaders pitch customer-first ideas.
The change held because the leaders modeled it before they asked for it. Each one ran a customer-centric habit themselves, pushed the ones that worked into their teams, and watched what shifted. They scaled what moved a team and let the rest go. Customer-centric behavior spread because the leadership practiced it first.
The board put ten experiments on the table and dropped eight once the leaders saw they changed little in the teams. The two that scaled moved into the teams and stuck as standing practice.
“This approach is powerful. We changed behaviour in the leadership teams.”
Fabrice Desnos, CEO Northern Europe Region, Allianz Trade
Legacy Modeling a behavior and scaling what works became how the leadership team drives change, and it spread from the region into other markets, with one country leading the way. The lesson the board kept is simple. A customer-centric culture takes hold when the leaders live it first.