Three Strategies to Minimize Customer Service Silos

Connecting, rather than demolishing, customer service silos is the key to strengthening your customer service culture, and here are three simple strategies that will work.

During my time as a community college administrator and as a peer reviewer with a regional higher education accreditation organization, a common theme among colleges involved “silos,” a phenomenon not confined to educational institutions. Indeed, silos – including customer service silos – are just as prevalent in businesses and other organizations, especially those that are medium- and large-sized.

What are silos? Silos occur when the units of a business or organization are disconnected from other units of the business or organization. For example, the “accounting department” is isolated from the “customer service department,” meaning that both the accounting department and the customer service department operate in their “own worlds.” Consequently, neither department genuinely understands what or even why the other department does: it’s all magic. Moreover, neither department meaningfully communicates with the other department, which only fortifies the silos.

It should be of no surprise that customer service silos negatively impact customer service. As Kenneth H. Blanchard observed, “Customer service is not a department, it’s everyone’s job.” Simply put, silos hinder businesses and organizations from providing exceptional customer service.

That being said, rather than engaging in the unrealistic task of dismantling silos, businesses and organizations should instead focus their energy on connecting silos. Here are three simple strategies that will work.

Strategy #1: Create a universal purpose statement.

In a prior article, I shared Lee Cockerell’s strategy of creating a universal purpose statement that applies to each employee of a business or organization, regardless of the employee’s particular department. For example, Marriott’s purpose statement is “to be so nice to the guests that they can’t believe it,” while Disney’s purpose statement is “to be sure each guest has the most fabulous time of his or her life.” Because each employee is charged with advancing the same purpose statement, employees from different departments nevertheless share a common denominator that prioritizes customer service.

Strategy #2: Require cross-training experiences.

When I was an undergraduate college student, I worked at a cable company, which required new employees to spend time working with employees in other departments. For example, even though I was a dispatcher, I was required to spend time with an installer, a technician, a business department representative, and a front-line customer service representative. Likewise, a new employee – regardless of his or her department –  was required to spend time in dispatch.

Although I didn’t realize it at the time, the cross-training experiences strengthened each employee’s understanding of the how and why of every department’s functions.

Strategy #3: Emphasize “why” over “how.”

Speaking of why, in another prior article, I shared Daniel Pink’s suggestion to emphasize “why” over “how.” Recall Dan’s challenge: each week, replace two how conversations with two why conversations. In other words, hold two fewer conversations about how, and have two more conversations about why, i.e., “this is why we do this” instead of “this is how we do this.”

Within the context of customer service, understanding why a department does what it does is a particularly powerful strategy: whereas the how reveals the mere mechanics of a process, the why provides a deeper understanding of the process itself. Instead of employees telling customers “those are the rules,” employees can instead explain the purpose of those rules to customers. More importantly, if changes to particular processes are warranted, the why approach, when combined with an overarching purpose statement, reduces the risk of a department adopting a defensive stance in response to continuous quality improvement initiatives.

This week, conduct a quick assessment of the customer service silos in your business or organization by posing the following questions to employees in different departments:

• What is your purpose?
• What core processes do you believe Department X does?
• Why does Department X do process Y?

By doing so, you’ll be able to determine the degree to which your the departments in your business or organization are disconnected from each other, and, even more importantly, you’ll be able to identify which of the above three strategies to focus on first.

As always, have a “customerific” week!

Mark