Building Bridges To Overcome Departmental Silos For Better Customer Experience

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Harsha Khubwani

August 18, 2022

"Many brands still think that customer experience is part of marketing. This mindset deters them from enacting the entire customer experience journey effectively. If this is the case, brands need to collaborate with key departments (e.g., IT, sales, marketing, finance, etc.) to remap the entire customer journey for their major products and services." says Larry Leung, Principal | CXO at Transformidy, as per Clootrack's customer experience report.

The silos in an organization are good only if they are transparent and porous in nature. But, these types of silos hardly survive because one or two departments, such as marketing and CX, tend to underestimate the role of other departments in customer experience and do not cooperate at an optimal level.

In all manners, the disposition of existing silos in an organization is a barrier to customer-focused activities and the company's growth. As a result, consumers get an unpleasant customer experience that ends in customer dissatisfaction.

How Silos Destroy the Customer Experience?

With silos, a brand lacks clarity in its visions and long-term goals. Why? Because the priorities of managers working in distinct departments do not align due to silos. Top executives line up their operations to fulfill the department's responsibilities rather than the company's.

Often, the brand fails to deliver promised offerings as the organization's functioning is not on the same page. While interacting with the customers, one can observe frequent misalignment of different work units. Silos create unnecessary friction between two teams, preventing them from understanding the role played by each other in improving the customer experience. It restricts the company's workforce from sharing information, collaborating, and working with each other seamlessly. That creates big trouble for employees addressing customer's issues.

Further, the lack of unity among departments of the organization creates a notable drop in the customer satisfaction rate. Poor dealings with consumers negatively impact the customer experience. From CX to the IT branch of the brand, every department should be responsible enough to coordinate and generate an exceptional customer experience.

Role of Different Departments in Breaking Silos

Every division is answerable for providing the best customer experience as their responsibilities let them interact with consumers at different touchpoints or work on a customer-related task. In an organization, customer experience is flawed when all teams do not put aligned efforts towards fulfilling customers' desires.

Top executives often tend to overestimate their accountabilities and overlook the influence other departments have on CX. Apart from that, it's a common misunderstanding that departments such as customer service, marketing, and sales are only responsible for customer satisfaction. A well-defined customer experience strategy with a single focused point of view for the whole company brings improved business outcomes with a great customer experience.

Here are 4 departments other than direct customer-facing one playing a crucial role in breaking silos in a company -

1) IT Department

Definitely, handling every aspect of technical activities is the responsibility of the IT department. The accurate implementation of collaboration tools makes sure to carry on smoother interaction among departments. IT teams can deploy applications encouraging employees to communicate and sync their operations efficiently across the departments.

Another way the IT department can break silos is by releasing information about the updates brought to the product. They can organize sessions to deliver detailed knowledge allowing other departments to understand the product better. Further, that lets other departments serve the customer more reasonably while interacting at their respective touchpoints.

2) Finance Department

The finance team can break silos by sharing the monetary numbers of the company to set a joint vision and achieve the specified financial goal. Sharing finances with all the staff can provide them with more profound insight into the path they need to follow to enrich the company's economic status and customer satisfaction.

For example, if a company has a low customer acquisition and retention rate, the finance team can quickly figure out the negative impact on the company's income. Next, they can share this type of information with various divisions so that they can work accordingly to enhance customer experience. Ultimately, each section can come together to achieve one objective.

3) R&D Department

R&D (Research and development) department already holds enough relevant information. If that info is used and shared widely, it can generate favorable consequences that boost brand growth. Giving out reports with the aim of nourishing customer experience promotes cross-functional team activities.

Correspondingly, the teamwork encouraged by transferring information uplifts agility in the operations. The R&D team can get feedback from other departments on their work after valuable alliance to make practical judgments on every iteration. As the scaling up of the brands relies on the R&D team's findings, input from diverse crews is critical in enhancing their work output.

4) HR Department

The HR department of a company is the only department that can enable employees from different teams to interact directly. They can urge employees to socialize and be part of the events the company schedule past work hours for collaborative purposes.

A Stanford report shows that when people were treated as if they were working together, the only social sense of teamwork brought persistence to 48 to 68 percent allowing them to last longer on a challenging task.

The HR team can arrange team activities either in the workplace or outside just for the sake of enjoyment and to increase the level of comfort between the two teams. Such exercises can ignite the coordinated procedures for more satisfactory upshots and competently break silos.

5 Ways to Break Down Silos for Better CX

Silo mentality ends up in a broken customer experience. When there is no free flow in customer data and analytics reports in the company, consumers face issues with the brand's services due to a lack of transparency.

The communication gap and disjoint operations among the departments raise issues such as wrong information delivery to customers. For a top-notch customer experience, breaking silos in the organization is indispensable.

Here are 5 ways to break down silos for better CX -

1) Encourage Collaboration With Different Departments

Collaboration with other departments ensures priorities of the entire workforce align towards serving best to the customers. The top executives should encourage affiliation of teams conforming to customer-first approaches to break down the silos.

Moreover, a brand must take the VoE (Voice of the Employee) initiative and work on the feedback collected from various business units to enhance customer metrics such as customer loyalty, customer satisfaction, and customer lifetime value. Achieving the goal of improving CX becomes the utmost painless if brands choose to promote flawless association.

2) Conduct Meetings and Training Sessions Across Departments

In the long run, the curated customer flow is essential for an ideal customer experience. Every employee working in a company needs to recognize well and streamline their proceedings with customer desires. And for that, conducting meetings and training sessions to comprehend the target audience in a sounder way is much needed.

The brand can put together conferences discoursing customer-led strategies that require the involvement of all departments because the destination for the organization as a whole must be the same - furnishing a better customer experience and accomplishing long-term customer-oriented goals.

3) Set Target and Communicate Well With All Employees

A company can witness frequent changes in brand perception due to the dynamic nature of the market. So, to maintain the brand relevance and walk on an even path to excellent customer experience, setting the monthly and annual aims and communicating them with staff members is vital.

A brand can block some time to explain its plans and draw a clear picture of the agendas to be followed in the near future to increase operational efficiency. Different teams can grasp the solitary goal defined by the brand and break silos by working jointly to achieve it.

4) Use Right Strategy To Unite Efforts Proficiently

In the buying process, a customer goes through several touchpoints before the checkout, which includes interactions with different bodies of the firm. To guarantee fulfillment of customer needs at every point of contact, the brand must follow a suitable method and construct a characterized set of rules to align the daily administrative operations to elevate cooperation among different work units.

An organization can set a customer-driven system that ties in and analyzes the work outcomes of every department. Invariable work on combining and directing the endeavors towards meeting customer expectations boosts CX activities and generates predicted results.

5) Bring Outstanding Governance Structure for Better Alliance

A structured approach to corporate concerns never fails to equip the enterprise with long-term solutions. Similarly, establishing a remarkable surveillance framework break silos and strengthen the in-house alliance, offering an unbeatable and everlasting customer experience.

To get the governance structure in place, managers and leaders of each department can double-check and convey the impact of their performance on CX after completing one project cycle with each other. It will upgrade the management setup by holding top executives under one umbrella. Besides, this setup keeps track of all aligned activities that enforce customer-centricity for greater CX.

4 Major CX Benefits of Breaking Down Silos

The siloed scheme for organizational processes limits business units from forming unity at the firm level. The incomplete and broken pipeline of operations stops the individual team from contributing to an extraordinary customer service experience. Break in silos lets an organization make the most of the decisions taken to enrich customer value.

Here are 4 prominent CX benefits obtained from breaking down silos -

1) Improve Workforce Productivity

When a company executes the silos breaking practices, teaming up several departments becomes easy and effective. The productivity noticed on account of valuable unions increases drastically. For that, the brand can observe a significant uplift in customer experience.

2) Shut Out Duplicate Work

Unwarranted wastage of resources occurs if work duplicates on the grounds of silos. Departments usually do not communicate competently, which hinders sharing of already existing information. The rupture in silos authorizes the persuasive transmission of assets that save resources and permit the company to put more effort into customer-based undertakings.

3) Increase in the ROI

As a result of broken silos, department processes put in order yield a pleasant customer experience, and further, happy customers fetch high ROI supporting the overall growth of a brand. The revenue expansion provides a privilege to experiment and implement various customer-centric actions that attract potential customers to the business.

4) Strong Intra-Organizational Relationships

Meetups initiated by top executives in favor of breaking the silos nourish associations that play an integral role in attaining the company's target. Healthy relations between the employees make the working environment more interactive, entitling departments to perform together and build on each other's customer-focused workouts.

To Wrap Up

The topic of breaking the silos is a bit arguable in the industry. The silos exist in an organization for stability and security purposes. But, the rapid shift in customer behavior needs the breaking of silos in the organization for the enhanced customer experience. A brand can break silos with the appropriate governance structure, strategy, team collaboration, training sessions, and smooth communication.

Breaking silos provide various advantages that optimize the functionality of all the units, helping a brand to gain positive customer perception. Furthermore, with only one shared ambition, all the departments can work towards customer contentment as each department have a specific role to play in the customer journey. Hence, breaking the silos is absolutely imperative for improved customer experience.