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How Company Silos Can Destroy The Customer Experience

This article is more than 5 years old.

Dan Gingiss

As a frequent traveler and hotel loyalty program aficionado, I often find myself staying in the same hotel when I visit a city more than once. That’s how I noticed that one particular hotel had changed the faucets on the bathroom sink.

It was a nice faucet -- an upgrade for sure. That's probably why I noticed it. But I didn't really think much about it until the next morning when I went to iron my shirt. I tried to fill the iron under this new faucet and the iron did not fit.

With a meeting in a half an hour, I had to get creative. I cupped my hands and used them as a funnel to put water into the iron; it worked. Later someone asked me why I didn’t just use the cup at the sink, but that’s not really the point. I was stressed about not being able to iron the shirt, and went with the first plan that came to mind.

The point, it turns out, is that this was a customer experience failure on the part of the hotel, when in fact it was meant to be a customer experience improvement -- remember that the new faucets were an aesthetic upgrade.

How did this happen? The most likely answer is that the person in charge of the irons and the person in charge of the faucets were not the same person, and they didn’t talk with each other. These silos occur in most companies, and they are big contributors to customer pain points. Frustrated customers, it should be noted, are more likely than their satisfied counterparts to share their feelings on social media.

The second major issue is that the hotel didn’t consider all of the (obvious) use cases for a bathroom sink. The list isn’t long, so each of these use cases should have been reviewed to ensure that the new faucets fulfilled their needs:

  • Brushing teeth
  • Washing hands/face
  • Drinking water
  • Filling the coffee maker
  • Cleaning an article of clothing
  • Filling the iron

It’s not like I was trying to make macaroni and cheese in the sink, or some other crazy scenario that couldn’t be planned for. Since most hotels place an iron in the room, it’s fair to say they are already anticipating this use case. And yet the faucet change prohibited me from ironing my shirt anyway.

Even in a siloed company, it's really important that each person stops and thinks about how customers are going to experience the particular part of the journey that the person oversees. In this particular case, the person in charge of the faucets could have easily come up with the half-dozen use cases listed above; they're not particularly complicated. Had they done so, they would have chosen a different faucet model.

Corporate silos are customer experience killers because customers don't care about how your company is organized. They simply see one fluid experience -- their own.

If you find yourself managing a silo, a simple first step is to think about what the customer is doing immediately before the particular experience you’re working on, and what are they going to do immediately after the experience. This is a more manageable task than trying to reinvent the entire customer journey every time you change any piece of the experience, and at least you can ensure that the transition in and out of your part of the experience is seamless. If everyone did this, silos wouldn’t matter.

It is also critical that everyone on the team has a clear map of the customer journey. Many companies skip the step of developing a journey map because it’s arduous and time-consuming. But putting yourself in your customers’ shoes and understanding every step of their journey is the surest way to identifying and fixing pain points along the way.

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