Unf*cking Your CX #13: The Silos Are Killing You – It’s Time to Build Champions and Lose the Bullsh!t

Let’s cut the crap—your silos are wrecking your customer experience, and if you think running another cross-functional "alignment meeting" is going to fix it, you're dead wrong.

Silos aren’t broken by talking about collaboration; they’re destroyed by champions who take charge, cross boundaries, and deliver real results.

If your organization is stuck in endless meetings while your customers are suffering, guess what—you’ve got talkers, not doers. And the talkers?

They’re killing your CX.

Why Silos Get Formed:

1. Departmental Focus on Metrics vs. Business Outcomes Silos form when teams are focused on their own specific metrics (like NPS for CX or conversion rates for marketing) instead of aligning with broader business outcomes like revenue growth or customer retention. When departments are only measured on their internal KPIs, they prioritize their own success over collective success.
2. Lack of Cross-Department Communication When communication only happens vertically within a department (up to leadership and back down), teams rarely share critical insights or collaborate across departments. This creates a lack of alignment, with each team operating in a vacuum, unaware of how their actions affect other parts of the customer journey.
3. Hierarchical Decision-Making Traditional hierarchies often reinforce silos by keeping decision-making within each department. Departments report to their own leaders and rarely collaborate at the ground level with other teams. This "command-and-control" structure can limit the flow of information and collaboration across departments.
4. Territorial Behavior and Ownership Silos also form because teams tend to "own" their piece of the customer experience and guard it fiercely. For example, marketing owns the acquisition stage, while operations own fulfillment. This creates territorial behavior where teams focus on their responsibilities and resist collaboration, believing that cross-departmental work dilutes their control.
5. Disconnected Tools and Processes Different departments often use different tools, systems, and processes that don’t integrate well with each other, making it hard to share data or collaborate effectively. This leads to fragmented customer experiences because teams are working with incomplete or isolated information.
6. Internal Competition or Misaligned Incentives If departments are incentivized to meet their own goals rather than company-wide goals, silos are reinforced. For instance, if sales is measured on revenue targets but not on customer retention (which might be owned by CX), each department may only focus on its own objectives, creating fragmentation.

Here’s how you unf*ck your silos: Find and empower your champions, and watch them smash through the walls of bureaucratic bullshit to make real, measurable impact.

3 Player Tips: Build Your Champions, Break the Silos

1. Stop Asking for Permission—Just Do It

Champions don’t wait for a green light. They see a problem, grab the right people from across departments, and fix it. They don’t need a quarterly strategy meeting to solve a customer issue—they make it happen in real time. You want to kill your silos? Let your champions act without waiting for corporate red tape.

Action: Identify the doers who are already taking ownership of customer problems without needing a formal invite. Then, empower them to act without waiting for leadership approval.

2. Tie Every Move to Business Outcomes

Forget vanity metrics like NPS and CSAT scores. Champions are obsessed with business outcomes. They’re not just making customers "happy"; they’re increasing revenue, reducing churn, and improving retention. If your CX initiative isn’t moving those metrics, it’s not worth doing.

Action: Challenge your champions to prove how each CX initiative is driving business results. If they can’t show you how it impacts the bottom line, they’re just keeping busy without delivering real value.

3. Collaboration Isn’t a Meeting—It’s Problem-Solving

Sick of those cross-functional meetings where nothing gets done? That’s because the wrong people are in the room. Real champions don’t talk about collaboration—they live it. They pull in the right departments, solve problems together, and move on. No fluff, no wasted time.

Action: Audit your collaboration efforts—are they just meetings, or are they delivering real outcomes? Champions don’t need to "discuss" things—they execute. If that’s not happening, you’ve got a serious do-nothing culture to fix.

2 Frameworks: Empower Your Champions, Crush the Silos

1. The CX Champion Checklist – Pressure-Test the Strength of Your Doers

If you want to know whether you’ve got real champions on your team or just a bunch of talkers, put them through the wringer. Here’s how you pressure-test them:

• Outcome-Obsessed: Ask them how a recent CX initiative directly impacted revenue or customer retention. If they can’t give you the data, they’re not a champion.
• Cross-Department Influence: How did they collaborate with Ops, Tech, or Marketing to fix a customer pain point? If their answer doesn’t include specific cross-functional actions, they’re still stuck in their silo.
• Proactive Problem-Solving: Give them a scenario where they had to fix a customer problem involving multiple departments. Did they solve it quickly, or did they wait for someone else to take the lead?
• Speed of Execution: How fast did they act when sh*t hit the fan? If they needed a project plan and three meetings, they’re too slow to be a champion.

Action: Use this checklist to identify who your real CX champions are. If they can’t give you clear, data-driven answers, they’re just filling space.

2. The Silos-Killer Champion Playbook

Want to crush your silos once and for all? Here’s how you turn your champions into silo-smashing machines:

• Step 1: Immediately identify 5 champions who are already driving action across departments. These are your people who own problems from end to end and pull in the right teams without waiting for permission.
• Step 2: Create bi-weekly Champion Accountability Sessions. Each champion reports back on how their cross-functional efforts are tied directly to business outcomes—whether it’s reducing WISMO calls or increasing customer retention. No “we aligned” updates. We want results.
• Step 3: Tie shared business outcomes to every department. CX and Ops should be co-owning delivery satisfaction, just like Marketing and Sales should be tied to upsell success. Joint ownership means joint accountability, and that’s how silos start to break.

Action: Implement this playbook with your top 5 champions and watch the walls come down as they force collaboration through outcomes, not meetings.

1 Question for You:

Who on your team is owning CX outcomes and driving cross-department action—without needing to be told?

What Happens If You Don’t Take Action?

If you don’t act now, your silos will keep strangling your CX. Your teams will continue to operate in isolation, customers will suffer, and competitors who move faster will grab the loyalty you’re losing. And once it’s gone, good luck getting it back.

Your Next Move

Run your Champion Identification Session this week. Use the checklist to find out who your real champions are and who’s just playing along. Set up your first accountability session within the next 14 days. If you want to stop losing customers and start breaking silos, the time to act is right now.

You can keep running your meetings, pushing for alignment, and hoping collaboration magically happens. Or you can get serious and start building champions who own real outcomes and force cross-departmental results. The talkers will keep you stuck, wasting time and resources.

But your champions? They’ll lead the charge, break down the silos, and fix the broken parts of your customer journey that you’ve been talking about for years.

It’s time to unf*ck your CX by empowering the doers. So, who’s leading your charge?