Breaking Down Silos: How Experience Strategists Can Bridge the Gap
Introduction
As hosts of the Experience Strategy Podcast, leaders of The Experience Strategy Collaboratives, and consultants to some of the world's leading companies, we are in a unique position to understand the challenges faced by experience strategists. One problem stands out as the most pervasive and detrimental - silos.
The Silo Conundrum
Silos have plagued organizations for decades. In the context of experience strategy, silos represent the divisions and barriers between departments, teams, and functions within a company. These divisions often fracture the view of the customer and their needs, leading to fragmented solutions that negatively impact customer success. Additionally, the constant tug of war across these silos leaves employees feeling less directly capable of impacting the customer outcomes.
Why Silos Are a Challenge
While dependencies exist across organizations, no part of an organization is as interdependent as customer experience. Every department or function in a company depends on the customer and is ultimately measured by the customer’s purchase and loyalty. Therefore, the inability to work collaboratively and break down silos directly hinders a company's ability to provide an exceptional customer experience and value.
Bridging the Gap: Top 3 Strategies for Experience Strategists
To deliver a seamless and exceptional customer experience, here are the top three strategies required to reduce silos:
1. A Cohesive View of the Customer and Their Needs
The first step in uniting teams around a customer view is to create a cohesive view of the customer and their needs. This involves breaking down the barriers between departments and ensuring that everyone has a clear and unified understanding of who the customer is, what their needs are, and how those needs evolve over time. To achieve this, we recommend looking at customer modes instead of traditional journey mapping and creating an understanding of your customer’s Jobs to Be Done.
2. A Shared Language and Set of Metrics
To effectively manage the customer experience across departments, it's essential to establish a shared language and set of metrics for describing and measuring that experience. While many experience strategists use marketing metrics such as Net Promoter Score (NPS) to measure success, we recommend that experience strategists use experience metrics like Time Well Spent to evaluate whether the customer believes your product or service is a good use of their time.
3. Mutual Respect and Understanding
Perhaps the most critical aspect of breaking down silos is fostering mutual respect and understanding among the various departments and teams within an organization. Experience strategists work to bridge the gap between these silos by facilitating communication and collaboration. This involves recognizing the unique roles that individual departments play in the customer's journey and highlighting the interdependencies between them. By fostering a culture of collaboration and empathy, experience strategists help ensure that teams work together harmoniously to deliver an exceptional customer experience.
How The Experience Strategy Collaboratives Help
Each year, we bring non-competitive teams from a wide range of companies together on a year-long guided innovation journey. We help them:
Learn new tools and game-changing frameworks that can be applied across their organization
Create innovative concepts based on emerging customer trends so that they can stay ahead of the competition and work collaboratively across teams toward powerful, shared goals
Conduct game-changing quant and qual research with their customers that unlock a deeper understanding of their customers’ modes, Jobs to be Done, and evolving needs.
Challenge old assumptions about what works for their customer and how teams can meet those needs.
Deepen relationships and communication within teams in an environment specifically designed to break down silos, stimulate new ways of thinking, and foster trust and collaboration.
Conclusion
Silos inevitably fracture the customer view, frustrate employees, and hinder a company's ability to provide value. Experience strategists carry a sometimes daunting responsibility to integrate and unify companies around a shared customer view. It’s a tall order, but we’re here to help your experience become more impactful for your customers and your company.
Contact us HERE to learn more.