Just need to hoard away some extracts from the Hoffi Braver Brands newsletter. My highlights in bold!
Most organisations are full of walls: departments, teams, budgets, systems, responsibilities and reporting lines. Those walls often exist for good reasons. You need specialists. You need accountability. You need people who know what they are responsible for. The problem is not that the walls exist. The problem is when the customer has to navigate them.
Customers rarely think about organisations in the same way organisations think about themselves. They don’t think, “This bit belongs to customer services, then accounts, then operations.” They think, “I need this problem solved.” But organisations regularly make people understand their internal structure before they can get what they need.
You hear phrases like, “That sits with another department,” or, “You’ll need to speak to someone else,” or, “We can quote for this part, but another team will need to quote for the rest.” Every one of those moments makes an internal wall visible. And every time that happens, some of the organisation’s complexity is being passed on to the customer.
This is where silos stop being merely annoying. When teams don’t join things up, the customer does it for them. They chase different people, repeat information, forward emails, work out who owns which part, and piece together separate answers into one.
In effect, the organisation has outsourced its coordination problem to the customer. And the customer is doing that work for free.
Most organisations would never consciously say, “We’ve decided not to join this up internally, so we’d like you to manage the process instead.” But that is often what the experience amounts to.
The fact that your organisation is complicated is not, by itself, a customer need. Something can be complicated internally without feeling complicated externally.
Organisations spend a lot of time talking about being simple, human, collaborative, helpful or easy to work with. But customers do not experience those words in a strategy document. They experience them in the joins.
If you say you are simple but people have to speak to four teams to get an answer, you do not feel simple. If you say you are collaborative but your own departments do not appear to collaborate, the word starts to feel hollow. If you say you put people first, but customers have to learn how your organisation is structured before they can get help, then the structure is coming first.
The answer is probably not to get rid of silos altogether. Specialism matters. Teams need clear responsibilities. The challenge is to make the walls less visible.
What we should be aiming for is not a silo-free organisation, but a seam-free experience.
That means paying attention to the joins. Who owns the whole problem? What happens when one team hands something to another? Does the customer need to repeat themselves? Do different teams give different answers? Who is responsible for bringing it all back together?
And perhaps most importantly: at what point are we asking the customer to do work that should really be happening inside the organisation?
There is a simple exercise worth doing. Take one common customer journey and map every department involved. Then remove the department names and look at it only from the customer’s point of view.
Where are they being handed over? Where are they repeating themselves? Where are they being asked to understand something that only exists because of your internal structure? Where are they doing the work of joining things together?
Because customers do not care how your organisation is divided. They care whether it works.
Photo by Julia Taubitz on Unsplash