Can’t see beyond your department silo? Check out ways to integrate your customer touchpoints.

It was the best viral marketing campaign in modern history for this airline. The marketing department hyped the airfare sale for days on the internet. Set to launch at midnight on a Friday night, every destination was discounted and consumers impatiently waited to buy their dream vacation. What could possibly go wrong, you say? Well, no one in marketing told the CX team about this campaign.

Rut roh.

And, when the website crashed like a photo of Kim Kardashian and a bottle of champagne, consumers flocked to the call center – emailing, texting, and calling customer service. Because they didn’t know about this campaign, the call center didn’t staff appropriately to handle the tsunami call volume. The call center was drowning in upset consumer calls. You can probably predict what happened.  Consumers were put in long-queues in the IVR and quickly thumbed their complaints on social in 120 characters or less. The brand took a major hit in its NPS and CSAT scores all because of misaligned customer touchpoints.

Tear down those walls

The dirty little secret that companies hate to admit:  departments can’t see beyond their own silo, locking customer data behind vertical walls. What’s the fallout?  Customers receive disjointed support from your company, leading to dissatisfaction and then to a pretty nimble jump to your competitor. The solution is an integrated customer experience.

Data siloing is a big problem and can dramatically impact the way your business operates and views the customer, especially at the strategic level. Companies experiencing silos can have:

• Flawed CX strategic decision making: Some CX executives are basing nearly 48% of strategic decisions on intuition or personal experience [1] rather than on analysis.

• Reduced customer trends visibility: Nearly 79% of companies report that they are unable to create a single view of the customers. With silos and disjointed data, it is nearly impossible to follow the customer through his or her journey to know what’s working – and what’s not.

• Failure to execute on a holistic customer experience: At each touchpoint, the front line teams need access to customer data to provide a great experience.

If you are struggling to piece together a single view of your customer, you’re not alone: 80% of companies report moderate or high degrees of silos.[2]

According to the 2020 Global Customer Experience Study[3], organizations must tear down the walls in business and make more customer-centric investments to improve the customer experience. A holistic, strategic approach is required. The study found that walls between IT and the business unit are causing CX confusion and friction. The problems arise when IT is forced to make decisions for other departments with a different set of metrics, approaches and technology solutions. But more than technology-related walls, 81% of the respondents cited people issues, including lack of sponsorship, adoption, lack of awareness of the CX commitment.

To accelerate change, a well-synchronized brand in the customers’ eyes is key. But how can you get anywhere, if you don’t know the way to get there?

Map the customer journey

Let’s face it - your overall business strategy must focus on the wider multichannel customer experience (CX). CX facilitates a consistent customer experience across all key parts of the interaction with an organization. This includes your CRM, marketing, sales, website and of course, the call center.  The ultimate goal is to ensure everything works together. To do this, you must take time to map out the entire customer journey, so you can see how each role plays into the customers’ overall satisfaction with the service and your organization.

One way to break through the silos of data across function is to consider each touchpoint from a customer’s perspective, rather from a department’s perspective. For instance, consider a customer opening a new account with a cell phone provider. What systems are they interacting with? What data do they need to provide, and what data do you already have available?

When you combine touchpoints across multiple streams or departments, you get a much richer view of the customer’s experience at each touchpoint. Moreover, you can use multiple sources to make their experience better – both through proactively suggesting the next steps or not asking for data you already have.

Maintain a successful customer-focused culture

You know that culture is a major driver of success. You want your customers’ feedback, but you also want your front-line associates to give you feedback and comments, which creates open lines of communication enabling market listening. Foster that customer-centric culture and make it an easy channel for your agents. From a CX standpoint, the feedback will also reveal insights for service improvements: So listen up.

Provide perspective across teams

Great CX companies seek cross-functional input. Make sure that your customer service, customer success or sales teams don’t dictate the overall customer experience. Cross-functional teams are meant to collaborate and seek to understand how other roles help fulfill the brand promise, improve customer experience and grow your bottom line.

[1] Dun&Bradstreet

[2] Ibid

[3] 2020 Global Customer Experience Study, PegaSystems

Want to learn more about how you can make your customer experience strategy even better? Download our guide on best practices!