CEOs: Silos Solved by CX Strategy

Silos can be solved by customer experience strategy. Why? A silo is anything that should be connected, but isn't. "Should" is determined first by customer needs. When silos affect customers, costs skyrocket and growth is restricted. This affects budgets, salaries, and dividends. It's a downward spiral of austerity, shrinkflation, inflation, layoffs, and so on.

Your customer experience strategy should focus on silo-smoothing for highest profitability and revenue growth.

Customer-aligned mindsets, handoffs, policies, etc. prevent roadblocks to value. This is what I call "Experience Leadership".

1) Customer Insights: mine what customers are already telling you (almost-free VoC) in service calls, online interactions, operational data, customer comments from all types of surveys, etc. Use tech to find patterns in unstructured data. Then share relevant patterns with every work group enterprise-wide, and for every efficiency effort and each growth effort. Use this clarity as the rallying point for every group's strategy .

Is this the top goal of your Voice of Customer strategy? If not, pivot now .

2) Design: get the end-to-end picture before drilling down, and use ongoing feedback loops to continually fine-tune. Over-emphasis on quick wins is diverting energy from your larger value potential. (Un-silo CX work itself.) CX annuities are your largest value potential because this stops issue recurrence, which frees-up otherwise perpetual sunk costs. Those resources can be redirected to higher value opportunities, yielding ongoing gains like an annuity does. Redefine key performance indicators , recognition, and bonus compensation to drive CX annuities. This will make significant gains in solving silos.

Remember that digitalization requires even more coordination among people: tech is only as smart as people set it up to be. (Avoid making your artificial intelligence artificial .)

Customer-aligned design engages every work group in self-managing their respective impacts on the end-to-end customer journey. This expands the value of your customer experience team exponentially. This is a model used by HR, IT, Safety, and Finance: every supervisor at every level is responsible for proactively understanding and managing their effects on people, data security, safety, and fiscal health.

Is this the top goal of your CX Design strategy? If not, pivot now .

3) Engagement: define ideal customer profiles by coordinating Biz Dev and Service. Triangulating cost to serve with lucrative segments is the first step to minimizing churn and costs. This clarity streamlines Marketing messaging to set realistic expectations and Operations delivery to meet or exceed expectations.

Adding more Customer Success, Customer Service, Digitalization, and so on in your budget does not necessarily mean you're customer-centric. It often indicates Jenga management : cutting corners which require an ongoing treadmill of fixes.

In customers' busy lives they'll value your brand more when it saves their time, resources, and energy -- not when it requires more. Rethink customer engagement as value you earn from customers by creating additional value for them. They've accepted your value proposition and paid fair market value. Getting things right the first time with greatest respect for customers' pressures drives organic engagement. Customer engagement is the capstone of your CX strategy.

Maximum lifetime value is the proper goal of customer engagement. Do this through trust-building and values alignment that strengthen relationships .

Is this the top goal of your CX Engagement strategy? If not, pivot now .

4) Metrics: recognize broader value achieved through customer alignment. CX annuities are reaped by focusing every work group on Customer-Critical Factors . These are the root cause bottlenecks inside each group's workflow. So, they are customized metrics co-determined by each group and your CX team. When I led CX companywide, every P&L had 2 Customer-Critical Factors every year for many years. This way we achieved more than 100 significant gains annually in customers' time and resources. This parlayed into significant trust, churn reduction, share of wallet and sole supplier increase, etc. These were huge savings for us that allowed shifting value-rescuing resources to value-creating.

Measure your CX team's progress in these ways: % of groups companywide with Customer-Critical Factors, % of CCF plans completed by original target date, % of strategies and growth endeavors supported by customer insights, etc.

Is this the top goal of your CX Metrics strategy? If not, pivot now .

Silos Can Be Solved by CX Strategy

In the 4 CX strategy recommendations above, you'll greatly reduce assumption silos, vision silos, goal silos, metric silos, and handoff silos. These 5 execution silos are at the heart of 5 operations silos: data, systems, processes, channels, and organization silos. Minimal execution silos increase the likelihood of solving and preventing operations silos. Aligning business management with customers is your most logical path.

"In our universe the planets orbit the sun. Customers are the sun. In our organizational universes, departments should orbit the customer, not the other way around. Instead, we see too many organizations where departments act like planets orbiting the CEO (Board, etc.), pursuing their own agendas. Too often, the customer is left dodging meteors and space junk; hoping they are on the right course." (quote from Nicole Maaguo, MPM, MISM )

To stand out from the crowd, solve silos with your CX strategy.

To thrive in ease-of-doing-business, solve silos with your CX strategy.

For customer experience excellence, solve silos with your CX strategy.

To maximize growth for investors, solve silos with your CX strategy.

Author?Lynn Hunsaker ?coined the phrase "Experience Leadership" to represent what's needed in the 2020s above the touchpoint management and experience management of the 2010s. In the 2020s we need to pivot to far greater trust, respect, values, and value. To fast-track your pivot,?Experience Leadership Mastery ?guides you within 2 to 10 hours across every managerial level in customer, partner, and employee experience combined.

To-date in the 2020s, we're sliding backward in trust, respect, values, and value, as monitored by the 2023 Forrester CX Index, 2023 Qualtrics State of Customer Experience, American Customer Satisfaction Index, Edelman Trust Barometer, and many other studies.