Why Customer Experience Efforts Fail - Part 1: Siloed Organizations

Siloed organizations that technically, politically, or culturally can not be penetrated.

Overcoming organizational silos is not unique to Customer Experience, but it does introduce new challenges in an effort to improve the customer experience. It is probably more important to first discuss why it is hard to overcome organizational silos and then specifically discuss the issue of why Customer Experience can not infiltrate an entire organization.

Product Managers have a pride in ownership and fear giving up that control to others in their organization. Few product managers seek or invite feedback from contact centers. Product managers feel opening up to operations will just be a “wet blanket” to their creativity.

The Sales Team often over promise on delivery deadlines, forcing others throughout the organization to hurry which creates internal conflict and decreases opportunities to open the dialogue on how to make improvements that the customer and/or the rest of the organization would benefit from.

Operations is in a constant struggle to find the resources and the capabilities to stay afloat with newly added complexity, some of which may not add any value to the customer. Many ideas are not properly vetted. As a result, Operational structures are becoming more centralized and thus, less likely to be penetrated in what is good for the organization and the customer because centralization simply adds bureaucracy and complexity. This is a self-fulfilling prophecy that was generated by those upstream from operations. Any savings that this would have produced their centralization is lost in coordination.

Collectively, no common language or common goals exist. I was with one company that every December, we would do our planning for the following year. We generated 256 goals independently. None of the executives were looking at the big picture to see who should be working together and who was working in conflict with their goals. It was incredibly frustrating to those that saw what was happening.

Let’s now translate this to the impact on the customer. Miserable, unhappy, defecting is what was happening. While no individual department had a complete end-to-end view of their collective actions were impacting the customer, the customer saw what the corporate blind spots could not and the experience was not unified or consistent.

Organizations think they are adding value to the customer, but collectively they are cannibalizing each others efforts. Each silo has their own agenda, mostly focused on increasing revenue or decreasing costs, but each silo’s actions have a reaction to other silo’s and the victim is the customer.

Technically, many IT devices are unable to talk across the siloes. Politically, people are serving themselves and not working together to serve the customer. Culturally, it takes a lot of work to collaborate and see how moving the needles collectively has a greater impact. This generates a mis-alignment of expectations among departments which certainly leads to failing to meet the customer's expectations.

In summary, organizations individually create collective complexity, ambiguities, and barriers for the customer. The customer isn’t going to put in the effort to solve your problems. They will move to another company that doesn’t have these issues (sounds like some old girlfriends). You have to solve them for yourself and consequently for your customer. Simplifying for your customer is optimizing for yourself.