More than ever, companies and organizations are feeling the pressure to deliver great experiences to their customers.
While a little customer annoyance might not have been as noticeable a few years ago, today’s high customer expectations and the power of social media allow a little annoyance to turn into a major problem for your brand.
So what do the most successful companies do differently in terms of how they evaluate and improve their customer experience?
What is the silo mentality?
The silo way of thinking is actually an organizational culture. In this mentality, departments or management don’t share information, objectives, resources, priorities and processes with each other. The silo way of thinking impacts operations and reduces employee morale.
What is the meaning of Customer Centric?
Customer-centric is a business strategy focused on generating great experiences for consumers to build loyalty towards their brand.
What do successful companies do differently to improve their customer experience?
Instead of working in silos, these competitive companies develop agile, cross-functional teams for optimizing their customer experience, pumping customer loyalty, and of course, profitability.
They bust corporate silos by adding flexible process layers on top of the traditional processes, rather than abolishing established solid structures.
“Companies don’t really have to reorganize departments to avoid silos. The most successful cases we have seen, in all these years working with banks and insurers, are those that assign cross-functional agile teams to solve a particular process.”
Paul Kienholz, CEO @ DANAconnect
There are two big challenges here: the first is to recognize what are those business processes and what is the data they produce that can be useful to share across the company; the second is about the people who run those processes and the systems they use. Both are connected and must be addressed by management in order to break those silos.
Breaking silos and eliminating siloed thinking
Although it is easy to recognize the significance of breaking down silos to help people collaborate across departments, we all struggle to achieve this.
Redesign the formal organizational structure has great limitations: It is really expensive, it creates chaos and it is slow. As a result, your company would probably end up with more problems than remedies.
On the other hand, eliminating siloed thinking requires great changes in the company’s culture to start putting customer experience first.
What successful companies do to work towards this mentality is to build teams centered around solving a specific transversal process, and then to give them authority and resources.
The key to create loyalty from customers
The value of horizontal teamwork is widely recognized. Bringing together cross-functional teams is the key to delivering experiences that result in stronger customer loyalty and retention.
Building a cross-functional team and empowering it with the resources it needs to monitor, analyze, and improve the customer experience takes time and effort, but it is essential to delivering great experiences that strengthens customer loyalty.
Having one communication software for each department Vs. having unified customer communications:
While Marketing Automation software is mainly used for keeping contact with your leads to promote and sell products, Customer Communication Software has a wider use, although it can also be used for marketing purposes after the sale stage is done, it can be use also for onboarding, dossier creation, document delivery, polls, even invoicing and debt recovery automation.
When using an automation platform that goes beyond marketing, a specific “event” automatically triggers a workflow that keeps projects moving and gets information in front of the right people all over the organization.
“To best explain it in a graphic way, Marketing Automation Software and CRMs only take you to the narrow part of the funnel, and then stops. Customer communication Software connects a tube to the funnel that crosses the whole company”
Fabiana Arroyo, Marketing Manager @ DANAconnect
A single platform for managing the whole customer communication offers visibility into all your organization’s data, empowering your departments by making them stakeholders.
On the other hand, using one single platform for all communication with the customers reduces the redundancy in contact data, and systems that have different special functionalities, like sending invoices, sending promotions, sending documents, processing signatures, uploading documents, making satisfaction polls, but at the same time they all have the main functionality that is sending messages to the customers and collecting data from them via webforms.
With one single communication platform, your organization can start taking advantage of the 360-degree view of your business for building stronger relationships with your customers.
4 Top benefits of one unified automation platform for customer communication:
- Having governance over all communications is sent
- Not having redundant systems making it easier for IT control over security
- Not having redundant cost for different software for each department that does the same thing
- Having 360 degree visibility into all your organization data
References:
Where are banks and insurers on their digital mastery journey? Understanding Digital Mastery in Financial Services
https://www.capgemini.com/ca-en/research/where-are-banks-and-insurers-on-their-digital-mastery-journey/
Breaking Down Silos To Improve The Customer Experience
https://www.forbes.com/sites/appdynamics/2019/07/02/breaking-down-silos-to-improve-the-customer-experience/?sh=34235c3ceeda
Cross-Silo Leadership, How to create more value by connecting experts from inside and outside the organization by Tiziana Casciaro, Amy C. Edmondson, and Sujin Jang
https://hbr.org/2019/05/cross-silo-leadership
Eliminating work silos to drive business value in your customer experience programs
https://www.capgemini.com/2020/10/eliminating-work-silos-to-drive-business-value-in-your-customer-experience-programs/
