The Prospect: "2 of your sales people contacted us for different reasons without knowing it from each other"
The Sales Team: "Our Product team invents products that customers have no need for.”
The Services Team : "The sales rep sold something that we cannot deliver."
The Support Team: "The customer complains that we asked the same questions twice."
The Customer Success team - "Our customers are overloaded with email communication from different parts of our organisation"
The Customer - "Your company feels like 5 companies and you don’t really know us/our needs”
Do these quotes sound familiar? Then you're probably struggling with a phenomenon that is spread across a vast majority of B2B companies. You're working in silos and your customer suffers from it. And as it stands - you are not alone, as a survey conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit revealed that 36% of executives claim that silos are the biggest obstacle to deliver customer experience.
The customer experience is the sum of all interactions a customer has with your company and not only the challenge of your customer services or marketing teams. Collaboration and alignment across departments is needed, making the delivery of a great customer experience a cross-functional challenge.
An organisational structure with functional teams, each with their specific goals and reporting to the CEO drives the behaviour to work in silos. If marketing needs to generate leads, sales needs to close orders and service needs to answer customer questions within SLA they will do so without taking into account the overall customer journey or customer experience.
If you do not motivate your teams to collaborate they will not step out of their silos. So how do you fight your silos and thus lay the groundwork for an improved customer experience? Establish connections between your silos and flatten them!
How to connect your silos?
Clearly define the functions of each silo and how they should collaborate to boost customer experience. Make the value of every role throughout the customer journey visible within the entire organisation. Do not assume that employees understand the function and added value of other silos.
Create temporarily cross-functional account teams with cross functional team goals. A great example are cross-functional key account teams: a business development rep, a sales rep, and a service agent with the same goal to grow the account by making him/her successful.
Create and empower shared service centers that drive cross-functional customer experience improvement projects. A business operations team or a sales enablement team are good examples of these shared service centers. If you let these functions report to the director of a silo they will do improvement projects for that silo, if you let these functions report higher they will drive improvement projects on a higher level.
Bring people from different functions together to brainstorm, learn and have fun together. Role-specific team buildings will create role-specific teams. Mixed team buildings will foster collaboration across teams. Also cross-functional training can be an eye-opener because employees start to see the bigger picture of the customer journey.
Create a network of customer experience ambassadors in different silos and let them drive the change in behaviour together with your managers. People are more likely to copy behaviour from a peer.
Reward people on cross-departmental customer experience metrics: NPS, CSAT,..
Or just flatten the silos:
Make your company less hierarchical. The more management layers you have without connection to the other silos the less collaboration you'll stimulate because teams are further away from each other in the organisation chart.
Or combine all the above.
Your customer experience can crumble because of silos, in case this sounds very familiar and you want to do something about it: let's talk!