Breaking Down Silos to Improve Customer Experience: 6 Essential Steps

Customers expect your organization to respond to them wherever (and whenever) they choose to reach out and they expect a connected experience with your brand. This means that every customer-facing team must work together. Download the whitepaper to learn six concrete steps you can take today to break down silos.

A siloed business, as in a company who’s various departments and teams don’t effectively communicate with each other, is at a disadvantage when it comes to providing exceptional customer service. Think about it this way: customers expect your organization to respond to them wherever (and whenever) they choose to reach out and they expect a connected experience with your brand, whether that’s through social media or through a contact submission form.

To manage the various methods in which companies now communicate with their customers, every customer-facing team must work together. Less-than-delightful customer experience has a real operational cost, and the fact is it’s impossible to meet customers’ expectations of a single seamless journey across all touchpoints unless marketing, care, human resources (where front-line agents are hired and on-boarded), legal (where customer and service policies are shaped), and the larger organization as a whole are involved.

The team at Khoros put together this whitepaper, titled “Breaking Down Silos to Improve Customer Experience: 6 Essential Steps,” to help businesses banish silos by utilizing cross-functional collaboration.

What is Cross-Functional Collaboration?

Cross-functional collaboration occurs when groups of individuals with different backgrounds and expertise (i.e. teams and/or departments) collaboratively work toward a common goal. In this instance, excellent customer service.

Given how easily departments silo themselves, disjointed customer journeys are not that uncommon. In our whitepaper, we lay out some warning signs that your brand might suffer from a lack of cross-functional collaboration.

How to Encourage Collaboration Across Different Departments

We’ve broken down 6 practical and achievable steps in our whitepaper to help your business reach its cross-functional collaboration goals. The high-level steps are as follows:

• Step 1: Develop a shared purpose and goal
• Step 2: Work together to achieve more
• Step 3: Unite customer care and marketing on digital channels
• Step 4: Measure and share results
• Step 5: Craft a holistic view of your customers’ experience
• Step 6: Leverage technology and break down silos once and for all

The Bottom Line

Investing in the digital customer experience can positively impact your brand’s bottom line in real ways. When brands to make this investment, they not only have the opportunity to earn higher revenues, they can also avoid expenses associated with customer attrition. But breaking down silos and achieving cross-functional collaboration isn’t always easy. If it was, this wouldn’t be such a highly-discussed point of conversation.

Download our whitepaper, “Breaking Down Silos to Improve Customer Experience: 6 Essential Steps,” to gather valuable information on the resources and steps needed to break down silos in your business.