COS System: the only consultancy 100% dedicated to customer culture
A conversation with the three leaders: Guillaume Antonietti, Gil Arban and Aymeric de Boishéraud
We decided to interview the leaders of the first customer culture consultancy. This was to better understand why this notion of Customer Culture is so essential to a company’s performance and sustainability.
Why and how did the topic of customer culture come about?
Guillaume Antonietti, you are the founder, how did you come up with the idea of focusing on customer culture?
I had been working for over 20 years in marketing research and, more broadly, in understanding consumer behavior, particularly in retail. In 2013, following numerous exchanges with researchers (professors at leading business schools in France and the US), I became convinced that something was missing in the way satisfaction scores were being interpreted.
Indeed, without a genuine customer-centric organizational mindset, no customer experience can truly measure up. In other words: no wow customer experience without a strong customer culture. The challenge was to better understand and measure this customer culture before working on it.
We therefore developed, through iterations, a methodology for measuring the customer orientation of an organization. We also developed an individual measurement tool. Since 2014, these scores have guided every consulting mission we carry out for our clients. The goal is to look at the company solely through the lens of customer culture and to identify the strengths and barriers to that culture.
What approaches help grow this customer culture?
Gil Arban, you have developed a specific method to address the individual dimension?
We do indeed work on both pillars: collective and individual orientation.
On the collective side, we establish an action plan based on the diagnostic, with two main objectives: mobilizing the Executive Committee, managers and employees on one hand, and on the other, setting up initiatives to break down silos, manage customer priorities, anticipate expectations and eliminate pain points.
On the individual side, the goal is to build customer-centric reflexes in all employees, without resorting to traditional “training” which brings little value. Too top-down for this subject, you simply cannot tell an employee: “We’re going to make you love your customers in a 2-day training session!” Our approach, grounded in neuroscience, consists of a several-week coaching program with gradual progression. It covers the importance of customer culture, how it translates operationally, how it is lived day-to-day, and what individual commitments it entails.
Some clients such as KIABI and APICIL have enrolled all of their employees.
How do you measure the impact on your clients?
Lucille Ogorzalek, you oversee numerous missions across several sectors : what are the impacts of these customer culture projects?
Every company has its own history, organization and strategic plan; no two missions are alike. The action plans we co-build with our clients are very different from one another. Even though we observe global trends, an Executive Committee not focused enough on the customer, front-line managers facing too many contradictory instructions, HR teams overly centered on skills alone, IT not prioritizing enough the resolution of pain points in their development roadmap, and legal departments treating compliance as a dogma are common patterns we see.
The impact of the projects we lead is significant, and satisfaction and recommendation scores consistently improve after 6 to 9 months of work. That is why our clients stay the course with multi-year customer culture programs.
For example, at CREDIT AGRICOLE and AESIO, we have been working on their customer culture for 5 years.
Beyond the quantitative aspects, a genuine customer culture deployed internally creates fluidity, well-being at work and fosters innovation.
Are these measurement and coaching methodologies sufficient to embed customer culture throughout the entire organization?
Aymeric de Boishéraud, are you working on other methodologies?
Since we operate in the realm of Mindset (a customer-oriented state of mind), it is essential to use multiple levers to advance the cause. Beyond our two flagship methodologies, grounded in academic research findings, we have developed additional tools. These are primarily aimed at raising awareness among teams. When you have more than 10,000 employees to bring on board, it is a real challenge!
To meet this challenge, we notably launched the Customer Fresco game. It has been a true success, with already more than 10,000 players by early 2026.
Some clients have even decided to have all their employees play, such as RATP and DB SCHENKER.
At the start of 2026, we are launching a new online awareness offering to facilitate deployment within large-scale organizations.
We are still a small consultancy, the only French consulting firm working 100% on customer culture projects. But we still have many ideas for what comes next…
Guillaume Antonietti, what do you believe makes you successful?
The topic of customer culture is still relatively new, even if the concept is quickly becoming a catch-all term like customer experience and customer satisfaction!
We were the first to work on this subject from an academic research foundation. And our resulting offerings are impact-driven. For us, customer culture must be a source of commercial performance, and therefore of more business. Driven by this ROI orientation and our scientific foundation, we meet a genuine market demand in a fairly unique way.
We do not place consultants in-house as large firms do; we commit to working alongside our clients to transform their organization through customer culture.
Author : Aymeric de BOISHERAUD