As the overall business landscape, and especially the online one, becomes more competitive, the customer service experience is quickly becoming the leading factor in determining whether a customer continues to patronize a business repeatedly or not. Because of this, simply having excellent customizable customer support software to guide the experience along is not enough to ensure high amounts of customer retention with your company.
In order to ensure the entire company is operating at optimum efficiency, it is important to make sure every employee is fully working to prevent a silo mentality within the company, so that all of the imperative assets that they have access to are being fully utilized. With those parameters in mind, how can a company fully work to prevent a silo mentality from taking hold and creating a poor customer experience?
To begin with, let’s actually define what a silo mentality is so that we can more fully comprehend the scope of the problem we are trying to solve in its totality.
What is a Silo Mentality?
In its simplest form, a silo mentality can be defined as the mindset that takes hold over a company when departments stop effectively communicating with one another and become more competitive instead of cohesive. This results in the corporate structure feeling more like a series of small, subdivided units instead of one large united front, which often results in a fragmentary and unpleasant customer service experience.
There are three primary types of silo mentalities that can take root in a company, and they are the operation silo, channel silo, and hierarchical silo mindsets. They are all equally destructive, but all manifest in different ways and involve different moving parts of the company.
An operation silo mentality occurs when every team functions at a near autonomous level and does not spend significant amounts of time interacting with members of other teams. This often leads to poor decision making because all of the available information needed to solve the problem has not been shared in a cooperative manner.
A channel silo occurs when there is a lack of communications between one or multiple departments who have the same overall goal but work through different channels, such as a customer support team that answers emails, phone calls, social media inquiries, etc. When these teams do not focus as a united front, it provides a disjointed customer service experience for the client.
A hierarchical customer service experience occurs when employees within the company are not encouraged to interact with their superiors. This creates a caste system within the company while not fully utilize all their imperative assets, which often breeds resentment among the employees.
How Can a Silo Mentality be Prevented?
The single most important thing you can do to prevent any type of silo mentality from taking hold is to remind every single employee of the company, at all times, that their number one goal needs to be focusing on creating a customer friendly experience. Some things you can do to help foster this kind of environment are:
– Create a knowledge base that is shared by everyone and is continuously updated
– Ensure all teams are regularly and efficiently communicating with one another about meeting larger company goals
– Allow for the formation of cross functional teams, which are comprised of members from different departments
If you would like more information about customizable customer support software and how it can help prevent silo mentality, contact PhaseWare at their website or by phone today.