{"id":361320,"date":"2016-04-14T08:47:49","date_gmt":"2016-04-14T15:47:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/customerthink.com\/?p=361320"},"modified":"2017-12-14T00:10:13","modified_gmt":"2017-12-14T08:10:13","slug":"solving-system-silos-for-customer-experience-excellence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/solving-system-silos-for-customer-experience-excellence\/","title":{"rendered":"Solving System Silos for Customer Experience Excellence"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"customer<\/a>The irony of technology is that it's often marketed as customer experience management<\/a>, yet it inevitably creates its own set of customer experience snafus. Examples I've heard recently include: "You'll have to log-in to our other site" or "That mobile app isn't available for the type of account you have" or "That went to the fax machine at our national site". Is it possible to prevent most of these customer experience hassles?<\/p>\n

System silos are sure to grow like wildfire with the ongoing proliferation of platforms, portals, and apps to solve specific needs. This is good: competition promotes better performance (nicer features, fewer bugs, higher uptime, etc.). And at the same time, this is not good: proliferation introduces more places for your data to be stored, more user interfaces to learn, and more misunderstandings between suppliers and customers (red tape nuisances, mustering patience to understand the lack of logic, chasing things that fell into a black hole, and tiresome delays). <\/p>\n

The diagram below illustrates how many brands provide a technology solution for various components of marketing. It’s not the number of brands, per se, that cause a challenge; it’s the number of business areas being automated and incompatibility of certain brands that increase complexity. The systems comprising the combination of all of these automation areas is referred to as a company’s marketing technology stack. Add to this the wide variety of technologies in use for order entry, billing, shipping, and other necessities for running a corporation, and the array of systems that need to talk to one another is truly overwhelming.<\/p>\n

\"technology<\/a>
\nSource: chiefmartec.com and KoMarketingAssociates.com<\/em><\/p>\n

Why System Silos Exist<\/strong>
\nSometimes system silos are the result of business acquisitions, with time lags in migrating data from one system to another. Other times system silos are caused by inability or hiccups in migrating data from a legacy system to a newfangled system. This is often due to inadequate or tardy change management planning. Workarounds are common when workers struggle to adopt a new system, and continually revert to the old system or manual or homemade methods. <\/p>\n

System silos crop up like dandelions when organizations or individuals are empowered to buy technologies. Technologies are shiny objects. They are alluring as a sure-fire fix to hairy challenges. They are exciting, with promises of immediate gratification. <\/p>\n

The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. Comparing what you have to what a technology provider is selling almost always seems to favor the less familiar option. Once you have begun to deploy a new system, the inherent pains continue the greener grass cycle.<\/p>\n

System silos are necessary for efficiency and effectiveness in processing certain types of data and operations for certain parts of the customer life cycle and for certain parts of the value delivery cycle. It would not be possible or desirable for a single mammoth system to take on every needed task. <\/p>\n

Even so, efficiency and effectiveness go out the window when customers get the runaround. If customers are so fed up that they leave, what good is it to automate in the first place? The answer is not in throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but in understanding and managing the hassle factors.<\/p>\n

System Silo Costs<\/strong>
\nAn unexpected side-effect of technologies is that they can gobble up people’s mindshare and bandwith to the extent that strategic thinking and collaboration are reduced significantly, except when it’s in the service of making the technologies work. If you’re finding that your staff meetings, ops reviews, and other gatherings are dominated by technology issues, system silos are undermining your potential.<\/p>\n

Costs to consider when determining the ROI of solving system silos (and preventing them!) include:<\/p>\n