Creating customer-centricity means addressing the deeply rooted silos that exist in many organizations. While most companies claim to prioritize the customer, structural barriers between key departments, like marketing, sales, and customer success, frequently disrupt this goal.
Barriers slow down decision-making, impair collaboration, and ultimately reduce customer satisfaction. In order to truly focus on the customer, organizations need to break down these internal walls and embrace cross-functional collaboration that taps into shared goals and a unified customer journey.
Silos are holding your business back
Silos in a company can lead to missed opportunities, frustrated teams, and, most damagingly, dissatisfied customers. Silos are created by fragmented data and departmental boundaries that hinder the seamless flow of information.
A disconnect hurts both operational efficiency and the customer experience. At the end of the day, no department alone holds all the answers.
Departments like marketing, sales, and customer success often function independently, creating artificial separations that impact customer outcomes. For example:
- Marketing: Focuses on attracting prospects, often using isolated martech stacks.
- Sales: Concentrates on closing deals and renewals, with their own sales tech that rarely integrates with marketing data.
- Customer success: Works on satisfaction and renewals, but their feedback loops and data often remain siloed.
Fragmented efforts lead to a disjointed customer experience and diminished customer lifetime value. Without collaboration, each department pulls in different directions, lowering renewals and diminishing the overall customer journey.
Why teams are divided and what’s keeping them there
Silos exist for practical reasons, such as budget allocations, departmental targets, and technology constraints. Each department typically works toward its own narrowly defined goals:
- Marketing is incentivized to focus on top-of-funnel prospects.
- Sales prioritizes closing deals and, sometimes, renewals.
- Customer success works on keeping clients happy, though its data is seldom used to influence other departments.
- Product management and UX/UI teams work on improving customer experience but often lack insight into other departments’ customer data.
These silos are perpetuated by data management practices and budget constraints. When each department focuses solely on its responsibilities, it reduces the chances for cross-functional collaboration, leading to misalignment and bottlenecks in the customer journey.
Dismantling these silos means companies can improve customer satisfaction and lead to higher retention rates, but it requires a strategic commitment to aligning departments toward shared customer-focused goals.
You’re not understanding your customers as well as you think
When departments work in silos, it’s easy for teams to miss out on the bigger picture of what customers truly need. Each team has a piece of the puzzle, but without collaboration, they are unable to see the full customer journey.
A partial view results in missed insights and prevents businesses from providing a seamless customer experience.
Shared knowledge is key for building trust and loyalty with customers. When departments don’t communicate, opportunities for insights are missed, and the customer’s voice becomes fragmented. Instead of using customer feedback across the organization, teams operate with limited data, often resulting in less accurate decision-making and weaker customer strategies.
Sharing information cross-functionally, on the other hand, creates a comprehensive view of the customer. It leads to more informed decisions, driving retention and loyalty by giving customers a consistent and satisfying experience at every touchpoint.
3 smart practices to fix your customer journey and bust silos
In order to combat the negative effects of silos and provide a better customer experience, organizations can implement several key practices:
- Cross-functional Voice of the Customer (VOC) program: Gather and organize customer input from various departments to create a shared understanding across the business.
- Connect departments through shared goals and integrated data: Prevent siloed outcomes by creating common goals and using shared data systems that all teams can access.
- Avoid overlapping responsibilities: Confusing or overwhelming customers with multiple touchpoints for upselling and cross-selling often leads to frustration. Streamline efforts across departments to present a unified front.
Bring your customers to the table with a cross-functional VOC program
A Voice of the Customer (VOC) program provides a structured way to integrate customer feedback into decision-making. Without such a program, decision-making is often influenced by the last person to have a conversation with an executive or sales lead, a tendency known as magpie syndrome. VOC programs prevent this by providing a continuous and structured flow of customer feedback, highlighting common themes and actionable insights.
A well-designed VOC program organizes customer feedback into themes and prioritizes it for action.
A feedback loop is key for making data-driven improvements to products, services, and messaging. When bringing all stakeholders; product, marketing, sales, UX, and operations, into the process, VOC makes sure that everyone has access to the same customer insights and can align their actions accordingly.
For a VOC program to work, ownership is key. Typically, the Customer Success team should take responsibility for managing the feedback loop. A team should be supported by Product, Marketing, Sales, UX, Data Analytics, Operations, and Leadership.
Automating the collection of feedback and categorizing it by customer persona, product feature, or sentiment is key. Feeding this data into a CRM system helps teams to prioritize actions based on real-time feedback.
Get every department aligned and powering toward one unified customer journey
Aligning teams around shared goals is critical to eliminating the blind spots that arise when departments work in isolation. By bringing everyone together with a shared focus on the customer journey, companies can eliminate inefficiencies and provide a more cohesive customer experience.
Why shared objectives are the secret to skyrocketing efficiency
When all teams are aligned through shared objectives, there is less conflict, and departments are more likely to pull in the same direction. This creates efficiencies in workflows and improves brand consistency, which leads to higher customer loyalty and better product engagement.
The tools and data you need to stay laser-focused on your customer
The quality of automation tools and data integration directly impacts how well a company can track shared goals. While complete attribution may not always be necessary, reliable attribution helps make sure that each department knows its role in achieving customer-centric goals.
Conflicting departmental priorities and competition over budgets often stand in the way of achieving shared goals. When adjusting processes and rewards to better reflect customer-focused outcomes, companies can align departments more effectively and meet customer needs in a cohesive manner.
