5. Breaking down organizational silos
As you begin to better understand the customers’ varied interactions with your brand or product, and their needs and wants, it’ll start to shake the foundation of your organization—the way you work, and how you make decisions, collaborate, use data, and build products and services.
Companies that embrace customer-centricity need to transform their structures to reflect it. This includes breaking down silos, which is still a major challenge in CX management.
Silos don't just inhibit communication—they can distort the organization's view of the customer. They lead to inconsistent or competing objectives, marketing, service, and measurement.
Organizations that aren’t internally aligned around understanding customers and improving outcomes risk creating inconsistent brand experiences throughout the customer journey. All too often, it’s the customer who has to stitch together the disconnects in their experience.
When organizational silos get in the way of the customer experience Let’s look at a hypothetical example where every team has a different idea of what a good customer experience is: - Customer success representatives focus on NPS
- Product development is all about how quickly the team resolves issues
- The customer support contact center bases good CX on their on-hold time or average handle time
On their own, each department’s effort is impactful in part. However, none of them are measuring the impact of their particular resolution, or verifying whether they truly delivered a customer experience that encourages retention and repeat purchases. Prioritizing the wrong KPIs can also harm the customer experience, and hurt the company’s revenue. With the teams focusing on KPIs like speed and NPS—instead of fully resolving an issue—each department’s efforts could also potentially lead to a dissatisfying customer experience. |
The key to overcoming silos involves a shared vision for the customer experience. It’s about bringing all groups within an organization together with a focus on making each experience more effortless for customers.
Silos need to be addressed from a board level downwards, with equal accountability and collaboration between the heads of product, operations, marketing, and service.
Build cross-functional teams
Great CX means simple, effective, and enjoyable interactions with your customers wherever they are on their journey. However, traditional corporate structures can make it harder to enforce more comprehensive CX strategies.
When product teams don’t connect with other teams and departments, they can end up working in a silo, forgetting you are part of a diverse company working towards the same business and product goals.
This forges a deep chasm between customer-facing teams in your organization, and the teams who could provide remedies to the issues customers may face.
Some methods of promoting cross-functional CX management include:
- Routinely reviewing and discussing the customer journey
- Sharing research and insights about customers
- Inviting people from other departments into the user research process
- Circulating customer testimonials and praise to help keep the actual people top of mind
Creating a shared understanding among the team on how users experience your product will help the whole team prioritize brilliantly.
Building cross-functional teams also means you're more likely to avoid project management challenges like miscommunication, unnecessary product renditions, and workforce conflicts. When product teams fully realize the support available from other teams, you can collectively work towards goals faster and more efficiently than ever before.
Pro tip: develop a shared goal based on product metrics and use product analytics insights tools like Contentsquare to convince stakeholders when you need support or additional product team resources. Here’s how to increase customer engagement (and, ultimately, persuade stakeholders) with product analytics metrics. |
Deploy CX inside of a holistic organizational approach
When different departments have complete ownership over various stages of the customer journey, the result is a disjointed and inconsistent customer experience.
Step back and revisit your customer journey. How much do you know about your customer’s experience at each touchpoint, or about your colleagues’ vision for each stage? Where does each department intersect?
Creating a brilliant CX for your customers is like a puzzle where every employee potentially holds a piece. Connect your teams by conducting brainstorming meetings with representatives from different departments, and encourage different employees to routinely take the customer journey and provide feedback.
Shifting from a standard department-centric model to a more holistic organizational approach lets you work with other members of your organization to create seamless transitions for your customers, instead of abrupt hand-offs.
Consolidate customer data
CX is an enterprise-wide commitment, but often, the relevant customer feedback doesn’t make it to the people who need it.
If departments like sales, marketing, and support keep separate customer databases, this can create considerable discontinuity to the customer experience. Each of these departments could be hosting only a portion of the complete portrait of the customer, leading to incorrect assumptions and assessments of their needs and priorities.
Having a strong CX strategy works on closing the customer feedback loop, so the insights it produces are available to every employee and department that can and should contribute.
Start listening and keep evolving your customer experience How much and how often you evolve depends on your company, your market, and your culture. And that’s where your ability to listen to customers and prioritize their needs plays a crucial role. To know what to change, focus on metrics such as Net Promoter Score, look at customer pain points, and find answers to questions like: - Why are customers frustrated?
- Why are they refusing to recommend certain companies (including yours) to their friends?
- What would win them over?
You can do this using different methods—sending out a survey, conducting phone interviews, even meeting up with your customers in person. An example of a closed-ended NPS survey question that leads into an open-ended one, for more context |