Building bridges: 6 steps to break down silos and improve CX

To meet customers’ expectations for a unified experience, marketing, customer care, human resources, legal, and other departments must collaborate effectively. Without collaboration, brands face:

• Disjointed customer experiences. Misalignment leads to a fragmented customer journey.

• Failed brand promises. Inconsistencies arise when departments don’t share information.

• Public Consequences. Poor coordination can quickly damage brand reputation and affect revenue.

Bridging these gaps is essential for improving customer experience and operational efficiency. Here’s how to break down those silos and build a more cohesive organization.

To truly enhance the customer experience, focusing solely on improving your product or service isn’t enough. The real challenge lies in fostering effective cross-team collaboration that supports customer-facing teams.

Collaboration begins with a shared purpose. This means aligning marketing and customer care around common goals and creating content and policies.

Start by answering these key questions:

• What shared goals can we work on with our customers?

• What defines our brand and core values?

• How can we link our KPIs to meaningful contributions such as revenue per customer or customer retention?

Once you’ve clarified your shared purpose, establish business objectives that resonate across the organization. Connect these objectives to measurable outcomes, such as top-line sales, operating margin, and customer satisfaction metrics like NPS scores and response times.

Communicate these objectives clearly, highlighting their benefits to different teams to boost engagement. Formalize this alignment with a Service Level Agreement (SLA) that details mutual expectations and processes, ensuring accountability and ongoing commitment.

“Avoid enforcing goals from the top down. While strategy may be set at the C-level, achievement of goals should feel like everyone’s business. Facilitate this by including all team members when setting priorities to build true alignment.”

— Wendy Mikkelsen, Senior Product Marketing Director - Digital Contact Center

With a shared purpose and clear objectives, it’s time to foster genuine collaboration. Start with marketing and customer care teams, which often have overlapping responsibilities and insights. Tackling systemic challenges like an apathetic culture or excessive red tape may take time, so begin with practical, actionable steps to build bridges. Here are a few simple ways you can carry your cross-team vision further:

1. Get in each other’s shoes

   • Shadowing: Spend a half-day or short sessions observing other teams. A simple “I’d love to see what you do and how I can support you” can open doors to valuable dialogue.

   • Experience exchange: Encourage cross-departmental task assignments to foster empathy and understanding.

   • Onboarding integration: Collaborate with HR to design a program emphasizing the importance of cohesive customer experiences and providing a playbook with key contacts, goals, and strategies.

2. Clarify roles and responsibilities

   • Define roles: Ensure every team member understands their responsibilities and how their role contributes to customer satisfaction.

   • Distinguish functions: Define responsibility for proactive brand messaging versus reactive customer interactions to streamline efforts and avoid confusion.

3. Balance reactive with proactive care

• Proactive engagement: Implement brand love programs or surprise-and-delight strategies to enhance customer satisfaction and foster positive brand perceptions. See how STIHL reaches millions of fans across social media.

• Learn from the best: Look at companies like AAA, Canon USA, and Bell Canada, which excel in proactive customer care and are expanding their reach and influence.

“Building effective cross-team collaboration requires empathy, clarity, and a balance of proactive and reactive strategies. If you put the customer at the heart of everything you do, you’ll win.”

— Wendy Mikkelsen, Senior Product Marketing Director - Digital Contact Center

Customers expect seamless interactions with your brand, no matter how they connect with you. So, how do you get customer care and marketing on the same page while managing thousands of interactions across multiple accounts and different departments? 

The answer: more innovative digital experience planning.

• Align customer care and marketing. Marketing sets the brand voice, while customer care ensures this voice is delivered.

• Keep teams on track with a shared editorial calendar to manage interactions across channels — direct messages, mobile messaging, chatbots, and more.

— Wendy Mikkelsen, Senior Product Marketing Director - Digital Contact Center

You can’t manage what you don’t measure. To gauge your success, track key performance indicators (KPIs) and pinpoint improvement areas. Moreover, without sharing these metrics and lessons, you won’t improve. Identify and prioritize areas for enhancing your communications strategy and develop a roadmap to optimize it over time. Share these reports with internal stakeholders and leadership, highlighting the team’s wins and learning from the losses.

Pass it on: 5 tips for effective knowledge sharing

1. Host weekly virtual huddles. Discuss current projects, major challenges, and new insights.

2. Build a distributed command center. Create a centralized hub for visualizing customer experiences and performance metrics.

3. Organize monthly summits. Use workshops or exercises to address efficiency or define the brand’s voice, and encourage teams to develop actionable takeaways.

4. Send weekly highlight emails. Compile and share wins using a simple internal newsletter.

5. Lead by example. Model the behavior you wish to see. Attend cross-departmental meetings, and invite colleagues to share their expertise.

— Wendy Mikkelsen, Senior Product Marketing Director - Digital Contact Center

Understanding both your customers' online and offline personas is key to delivering exceptional experiences. Here’s how to view the world from your customers’ perspective and ensure a seamless journey:

Put yourself in your customers’ shoes. Enhance your communication by mapping out and documenting customer touchpoints. Create a customer journey map that includes both upstream (e.g., publishing) and downstream (e.g., service resolution) activities, aligning them with departmental roles. This map should be shared across your organization.

Maintain interaction history. Offering stellar experiences is the foundation for fostering customer loyalty and advocacy. But wait, there’s more: you can’t expect the customer to “feel the love” if they are treated like a stranger every time they reach out. So move beyond the amazing one-off and into repeatable “wow” experiences. Start with the low-hanging fruit and then move to more difficult undertakings.

Here’s how:

“Not only can uncoordinated teams cause unnecessary hassle for your customers, they can also actually do long-term relationship damage. Customers don’t care how your teams work internally. They only care about the experience they receive from your brand as a whole, no matter who they’re talking to.”

— Wendy Mikkelsen, Senior Product Marketing Director - Digital Contact Center

Establishing cross-functional strategies is the first step in building a responsive, collaborative organization; scaling it independently of staff resources is the second step. Marketing and customer support teams must come together on a technology platform that drives cross-functional strategies. How you choose your technology matters, as it can unlock your ability to maximize value for your customers no matter how or where they interact with your brand. In a digitally connected age where personal recommendations are a key component of marketing, consistency rules.

The challenge? Technology solutions are only as good as the people using them and solutions are less effective when siloed by business units. Enterprises need to break down silos and leverage all available data points to best serve the customer across their entire journey.

“Technology and software solutions can ease the burden of marketing, care, and other teams on the front lines of customer service. Technology, people, and processes are the cornerstones of a great CX strategy .”

— Wendy Mikkelsen, Senior Product Marketing Director - Digital Contact Center

The bottom line: Invest in digital customer engagement

Breaking down silos is essential for delivering a seamless and exceptional customer experience. You set the stage for more effective collaboration and a unified approach to customer engagement when you address the key issues — like inconsistent communication, inefficient approval processes, and misalignment in strategy.

Explore how to overcome the challenges of working in silos and see actionable examples in our blog, "5 warning signs your brand works in silos (and how to fix It)”.

With the right strategies and tools, you can enhance customer satisfaction, drive revenue growth, and position your brand as a leader in customer experience. Start building bridges today and see the difference in your customer engagement and overall success.

Khoros Service is a solution that helps enterprise businesses scale their customer service operations quickly. It seamlessly blends synchronous and asynchronous modes of customer engagement. ​​

We are firm believers in the idea that every component, whether it is AI-powered bots or business applications, should work together to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of customer engagement strategies.

Our customer service software allows brands to serve customers on their digital channel of choice with unmatched operational insight to boost satisfaction and reduce costs. When you unify multiple channels in a single solution, you empower your agents with the ability to engage across all touchpoints, including but not limited to:

• Messaging apps like WhatsApp, Apple Messages for Business, and Line

• Social networks like Facebook, X, Instagram, LinkedIn and WeChat

• Review sites, like Google Play Store, iOS App Store, Yelp, and Trustpilot

• Brand-owned channels, like web chat, in-app, Email, SMS, and Voice

• Owned communities, forums, and knowledge bases