One of the almost-universal things today’s customers want is not to have to repeat themselves—to be able to go from, say, a chatbot conversation to a voice call, or even from one human agent to another, without needing to reestablish their identity, security information, and the issue they’d like support with, at every step along the chain.
That ought to be easy, right? You just record all that stuff during the first interaction, and keep passing it on, down the line. So why, all too often, does that not happen?
The problem is silos – data, systems, departments, and more, which are isolated from the rest of the organization. They don’t communicate and they don’t share, at least not well.
This creates multiple problems, including operational inefficiencies and – in many more ways beyond our single example above—frustrating customer experience (CX). In fact, a recent survey of business executives revealed the following as their top two challenges:
- 43% = limited collaboration across departments
- 38% = siloed systems, technology, and/or data
So how can we overcome these challenges? Let’s consider some critical concerns:
Data Democratization
Ideally, all data belonging to an organization should belong – and be accessible—to the whole organization. But that isn’t always the case. It’s not so much because departments just want to keep things for themselves—although that, too, sometimes—but more because each department has ways of using processes, systems, and data that work best for them.
Marketing, for instance, wants to see what issues people are having with products and services, while Training is concerned with how agents are responding to those issues—same data, different usage. So it’s not a simple of matter of just dumping all the data into one storage depot, but making that data accessible in a way that works for everyone.
Experience Orientation
The point of eradicating silos is for the organization to be able to work better, and for customers – both external and internal—to have a smoother, simpler, more satisfying experience. It’s easy to lose sight of this, when trawling through years of accumulated data.
To stay focused, representatives from each part of the organization must collaborate, striving to keep both effectiveness and empathy in mind. Tech experts, in particular, have to be conscious that what matters isn’t just how the new system will function, but how it will make people feel. By collaborating and prioritizing user experience, your team should be able to craft an outcome that leaves customers and colleagues smiling – not struggling.
Guidance and Governance
Silo elimination is hardly going to be a one-and-done endeavor. Instead, people will have to not only learn new ways of doing things, but get used to doing them consistently. So there’s going to be resistance, and your team has to figure out how to manage this.
Reassuring employees that there will be training and upskilling—that the new methodology is meant to support them, not supplant them—will be a great start. Beyond that, though, you have to think about how to keep them informed, invested, updated, and motivated. At the same time, your change management team must also consider how the new system is going to impact the organization in terms of security, ethics, and regulatory concerns.
As we’ve discussed, a main priority of silo elimination is to improve CX. Organizations that have undergone digital transformation to optimize customer-centricity are showing:
- 41% quicker revenue growth
- 49% quicker profit growth
- 50% enhanced customer retention
