I'm amazed Crotalus at your perspective..... customer facing is not about giving direct routes, or particularly trying to satisfy one crew; it's about 'servicing' as many aircraft as possible, surely?
And I say this as a Maastricht controller, where we generally use direct routes (providing there are no active military areas, EVERY flight gets a direct route normally from outside our border to the last point agreed with the next unit). But the idea that we should strive to give directs to satisfy individual flights is now an anachronism.
I'm totally with Scottish; making life easier for the next sector (thus reducing their workload and increasing their potential capacity) is true customer facing.