Break Down Silos for Customer Experience Transformation

The Gist

Silo challenges persist. Customer experience silos hinder seamless interactions. Organizations must break down these barriers to create cohesive, effortless experiences for their customers.
Customer-centric mission. Focus on customers to drive business success. A unified approach across departments enhances satisfaction, retention and revenue growth.
Transformational strategies needed. Organizations should prioritize experience mapping, training and feedback timelines to foster a customer-obsessed culture.

The most recent Forrester Customer Experience Index is creating a lot of buzz in customer experience (CX) circles — but for all the wrong reasons. Despite companies’ increased investment in CX improvements, Forrester found that customer satisfaction levels are at an all-time low. For chief experience officers (CXOs), those findings felt like a gut punch.

What’s happening? Some will point out that customer expectations are higher than ever. That’s true, but I believe that the real issue is the gap between what customers expect and what brands are delivering.

Customers expect brands to know them if they’ve had past interactions. They expect to move seamlessly from a chatbot conversation to one with a live human representative without the need to re-identify themselves or restate their problem. They expect to call their bank and say, “I want to check my account balance,” rather than listening to an endless array of menu options. Essentially, they want their experiences to be effortless.

In most cases, that effortless experience isn’t happening. In fact, it’s gotten so bad that the Biden administration recently released a series of customer service proposals — called “Time Is Money” — aimed at alleviating customer experience headaches.

The Problems That CX Silos Cause for Customer Experience Transformation

In agricultural terms, a silo is a tall, windowless structure that is often used to store grain. Silos stand alone. They’re not connected to other structures, and their contents aren’t easily accessible.

It’s helpful to have the visual of an agricultural silo in mind when we think of CX silos. Like their counterparts on the farm, CX silos aren’t connected to other departments or technologies. Employees don’t have good sightlines into their contents, and those contents aren’t easily accessible.

I’ve found that CX silos typically form because CX investment and management is dispersed among separate departments such as marketing, sales and customer support. Most business leaders agree with this assessment. In the 2024 CMSWire State of Digital Customer Experience report, executives said their top two challenges were:

“Limited cross-department alignment/collaboration” (43%)
“Siloed systems, technology integration challenges and/or fragmented customer data” (38%)

What’s interesting is that these two silo-related challenges ranked higher than “limited budget/resources,” which came in third. That’s somewhat surprising given that lack of budget is usually the go-to scapegoat for poor performance. Then again, it’s easy to pick out hundreds of examples where limited alignment and siloed systems lead to poor customer experience.

With various departments working autonomously, technology silos naturally form. For instance, marketing may choose one type of technology while sales chooses another, and customer service chooses a third. If these technologies aren’t connected, then a seamless customer experience is nearly impossible.

Customers won’t necessarily know that different departments within an organization use different technology stacks, but they will feel the friction when moving through the customer journey with your brand. For instance, they expect the information that the sales department has about their recent purchases to be automatically accessible by the customer support department they call when something goes wrong. When that doesn’t happen because data has not passed freely between systems, customers feel the pain.

Related Article: How Organizational Silos Can Destroy Customer Experience

The Importance of Breaking Down CX Silos

How do we fix CX silos? The answer is to start with the customer. It’s not enough for individual departments to say they’re customer-centric. The entire business needs to make customer-centricity its mission. This move will not only improve customer satisfaction, it will also drive successful customer experience transformation and improve key shareholder value levers like revenue growth, profit growth and customer retention.

In the same Forrester Customer Experience Index referenced above, researchers found that compared with their peers, customer-obsessed organizations reported:

41% faster revenue growth
49% faster profit growth
51% better customer retention

The stakes are too high, and the benefits are too big, for organizations not to be customer obsessed. But to become a customer-obsessed or customer-centric organization, most firms will need a transformation in every sense of the word, which is easier said than done. To make this daunting process a little more manageable, I’ve compiled a list of tips to approach CX transformations.

Silo-Busting Tips for Customer Experience Transformations

Think experience first, execution second. Evaluate your experience and its success from a customer perspective. When you understand how the experience should look, you can better map experiences to the right technology, data and channels. The strategy should be guided by the ideal customer experience, rather than by the CX technology and tools used.
Build a case for unified CX transformation. Focus on showing leaders how better customer experience benefits everyone through revenue creation, increased productivity and other benefits.
Form a CX project coalition. Create a forum to keep internal stakeholders engaged throughout project deployment to ensure new solutions align with organizational realities.
Don’t forget about the front lines. Support your CX rollout with training and change management that will help employees understand the importance of change and empower them to feel confident in their roles.
Create a feedback timeline. Map out when the next sprint will occur to ensure that decision-making across key tactics, technologies and processes does not fall back into silos.

Related Article: Your Silos Are Showing in Your Customer Experience

Low Customer Satisfaction Is Everyone’s Problem to Solve

Poor customer satisfaction isn’t a problem that can be handled by customer experience or customer service departments alone. It’s a symptom of companywide issues that can only be addressed by taking a holistic, multi-department approach and breaking down the silos that create friction throughout the customer experience transformation.

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