How Company Silos can Destroy the Customer Experience
With customer experience taking shape as a competitive differentiator, every brand is working towards creating the perfect customer journey. Be it the website, mobile experience or knowing customer preferences, organizations spare no effort in ‘wow’ing their customers. Yet, why is that customers get dissatisfied and switch brands? Chances are that silos mentality is playing spoilsport in your company’s growth.
How did Silos Begin?
Company silos have always had a negative influence on brands affecting both employees and customers. Almost 20% of companies1 say they are unable to break out of a siloed business structure that impedes their chances of success. So, how do these internal silos take root in the first place?
When a company is small, it consists of one big team with little room for silos. But, as it branches out into various departments and regions, it is natural for employees to get isolated from other teams. This causes communication gaps and inefficient collaboration, in turn, leading to company silos. When left unchecked, silos can cause serious inconsistencies in a company’s tone creating poor customer experiences. So, it is important for businesses to keep an eye out for company silos.
Types of Silos
Operational Silo
When the various teams present in an organization aren’t aware of one another’s operations and decisions, it is known as an operational silo. When every team functions autonomously without getting insights from related teams, it creates misalignment in company goals and poor decision making.
Channel Silo
This silo is common in companies that support their customers through different channels like phone, social media, support portal, etc. As a result, support teams won’t be able to provide a unified support experience to customers who contact through different channels.
Hierarchical Silo
Poor employee engagement among various levels of an organization causes hierarchical silos. 42% of employees2 feel that their leadership does not contribute to a positive company culture. In most companies, employees are not encouraged to engage with senior leaders. This creates a conflict between various levels leading to lesser collaboration and workplace politics.
How to Get Rid of Company Silos
#1 Create a Customer-centric Work Culture
Silo mentality is quick to form in businesses that revolve around revenue and sales. In a sales-driven work environment, teams view themselves as individual entities rather than a part of their organization. Be it sales, support, marketing or any other team, they focus on their respective roles in the customer journey. This can prove destructive to your workforce productivity unless the emphasis is placed on your customers.
Make sure that every employee knows the entire customer journey and the significance of each department in creating a memorable experience for customers. Begin to instill these values right from the employee’s onboarding process. This would make them understand the need to collaborate with other teams. By turning the spotlight towards your customers, it is possible to create a silos-free work culture with every team unified under one goal – to establish a great customer journey.
#2 Ensure Effective Communication Across Your Workforce
Lack of communication within your organization is one of the major causes of company silos. This won’t be a problem for small businesses where employees are of few numbers and the teams sit right next to each other. On the other hand, maintaining the same connection between employees is quite a task in big companies.
Though it is impossible to know everyone, information exchange between various teams is a necessity. 31% of employees3 said that more transparency regarding the overall health of the business would allow them to better understand their employer’s goals. Also, employees get more engaged by getting to know their organization’s recent achievements, customer success stories, and major learnings.
An online platform for your employees where they can share both their professional and personal achievements can go a long way in boosting the overall communication. Facebook’s Workplace is one such platform which has been designed for organizations. It works just like Facebook except that only the organization’s employees can access it from any location. From sharing the marketing team’s campaigns to design team’s product updates, it lets employees be updated on what’s happening in their organization. In addition, the employees get an all-round perspective which brings them closer to customer irrespective of whether they belong to the customer-facing team or not.
#3 Make Way for Cross-Functional Teams
How many times have your customers churned because they didn’t get a consistent reply from your brand? If the number is high, it could indicate that your company is working in silos. And, it is high time you take steps to boost collaboration among various teams.
Cross-functional teams are a great way to make employees from various teams work together. For example, one person each from marketing, sales and product team can be formed as a cross-functional team. Though they would still remain a part of their respective teams, a part of their day would be allocated to carry out their cross-functional duties. This gives room for collaboration and innovative thinking as each person’s insights would help solve problems faster.
In addition, it gives an opportunity to understand the roadblocks present in other teams, in turn, reducing the conflict of interest. When utilized constructively, cross-functional teams help provide a single voice to the organization.
Conclusion
Providing great customer experience is becoming increasingly complex and silos are making it even harder. And, most companies focus on improving their team performance and leave out the possibility of silos. But, the reality is breaking your company silos is the missing puzzle piece to improve your overall customer experience.
Source:
1 – https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/modal-offers/pdfs/0060629.en.aec.whitepaper.econsultancy-2018-digital-trends-US.pdf
2 – https://www.officevibe.com/blog/disturbing-employee-engagement-infographic
3 – https://www.kimbleapps.com/2017/11/new-survey-from-kimble-american-workers-care-about-the-well-being-of-their-employers-yet-lack-critical-insight-into-business-performance/
