The term silo often evokes a serene image of vast acres of crops with tall storage towers. However, when talking about data, the word provides no such calming perspective—and, in fact, likely incites the opposite perspective, one that directly impacts your organization’s success.
A data silo, or the collection of data that’s controlled by one department or business unit, is not easily or fully accessible by other groups in the same organization. According to MuleSoft’s 2022 Connectivity Benchmark Report, gleaned from interviews with 1,050 information technology leaders around the globe, data silos are a persistent challenge for 90% of organizations, especially in the wake of the pandemic.
This number is not surprising as organizations naturally build ‘silos’ between different groups such as marketing, sales, operations and customer service. However, for businesses tied to customer service, data silos negatively affect customer satisfaction, sentiment, retention, loyalty, online reviews and word-of-mouth and creates a disconnected Customer Experience (CX) and Agent Experience (AX).
The data silo problem is exacerbated in the customer service environment because of the growing number of channels including voice, mobile, chat, text, social and online. According to Forbes, 66% of customers use at least three different communications channels to interact—and those same customers expect a seamless experience regardless of the channel they choose.
Personalized interactions are a base requirement for delivering on customers’ expectations.
The following outlines some key strategies for overcoming the data silos disconnect
Data Silos – Recognize the Problem
Data silos can occur in a number of ways in the customer service environment. The most common is when a customer must explain their problem to three different contact center agents.
Rather than a smooth, seamless communication process, the customer is transferred from department to department. As patience turns to exasperation, a customer must again wait on hold and not only repeat their reason for calling, but also basic information like their name, phone number, address and account number.
This process is also exhausting for the agent, who often bears the brunt of the customer’s frustration and rage. This same agent needs a “swivel chair” to access disparate systems on multiple screens to properly do his or her job. As many systems do not speak to one another, agents must reenter the same information multiple times across systems. Like customers, agents are negatively impacted in similar ways.
Agent satisfaction, sentiment, retention, and loyalty are all casualties of today’s data silos.
If data silos are the problem, then unifying businesses and centralizing data is the solution to improving Customer Experience (CX) and Agent Experience (AX).
A Unified Approach
The best way to unify a business is by migrating customer interactions from voice, mobile, chat, text, social and online to a robust digital strategy, which allows for a seamless omnichannel experience, regardless of the channel through which a customer chooses to engage with your organization.
A true view of a customer’s experience will come from the ability to access and analyze data in its many forms.
Centralizing such data has a range of benefits. It builds greater agent and customer satisfaction, sentiment, retention, loyalty, online reviews and word-of-mouth. In addition, a digital transformation solution saves money, drives profits and increases efficiency. It also fully leverages the value of your business’s data, creates a clearer understanding of it, and better manages the data. It helps departments have meaningful conversations that increase the speed of change in the organization.
According to McKinsey, “40% of companies that excel at personalization generate 40% more revenue from those activities than average players.” An effective CX is the great differentiator between success and failure. Businesses wish to offer customers a personalized experience across products and services…but struggle to implement a holistic solution.
The Transformation of Data Silos
To facilitate a successful CX transformation, an organization must evaluate and understand its business goals. With regard to contact centers, assessments of handling procedures, call volumes and conversation rates can identify opportunities for improvement.
Better connecting contact center agent systems and workflows through a digital transformation also provides a foundation to implement intelligent routing and messaging, and leverage AI and Natural Language Processing into your workflows.
Minimizing data silos also presents opportunities to develop and enhance enterprise data management systems, organize historical and real-time operational and financial data and, best of all, drive predictive and proactive insights and engagements.
A recent Gartner study identified four key pillars to better customer services—connectivity, orchestration, knowledge and insight, resource management. Connectivity is the first hurdle for a reason. As the analyst’s noted, connectivity is all about “delivering a channel-agnostic, architected design to create customer service journeys, including intelligent self-service.”
That connectivity supports better automated interactions, knowledge and insight while facilitating the technologies that engage and empower employees. And who doesn’t want that?
A Digital Roadmap
Everywhere businesses turn, data integration demands are increasingly calling for more data scientists, business analysts, and contact center staff. The biggest challenges lie with incorporating data-derived insight into user-facing apps to derive real time or near real time information for a holistic view of the customer experience.
An added advantage will be the foundation for data science, allowing for capabilities such as text mining as well as elements of discovery in multi-linear factor analysis, impute execution and data profiling.
A successful transformation doesn’t have to be overly complex or time intensive, either. For instance, it took less than four weeks for the DecisivEdge CX team to design, build, test, and deploy the healthcare provider’s CX solution. DecisivEdge continues to provide on-going monitoring to ensure the solution is performing as expected, and conducts on-going analysis to identify the next set of improvements to pursue.
In another case, DecisivEdge detailed a Transformation Roadmap that prioritized recommendations and tangible activities to facilitate an orderly execution plan that prioritized rapid ROI. The Roadmap identified quick hit recommendations for immediate implementation, many of which the customer could perform independently.
Remember, silos are for farmers!
It’s time to leave siloed digital workflows for Customer Experiences and Agent Experiences behind.
Look for a consulting and technology service partner to help you deliver a personalized, customer-centric experience using a cloud-based contact center platform that enables your customers to engage with their channel of choice, while also providing your business the digital foundation to rethink operations, prioritize technology, data and analytics upgrades, and align digital and human interaction with speed and accuracy.