Silos: A Leadership Issue
By Kirsten Penaloza - Former CX executive, coach, and Organizational Advisor working with leaders to create kick-butt teams and healthy work cultures.
Silos - A Rare Case or the Norm?
Almost every organization I have been in (past or present) has believed it is data-driven. But few of them realize they are actually using only half of their data – and Sarah Betts, a member of the Support Driven community, recently explained why. Her LinkedIn post hit home because I’ve experienced that kind of disconnect so many times in my work as a client experience professional. She described the picture book story of a company where no one owns the relationship with the customer after the deal is closed - and boy, does it trigger bad memories: Salespeople unofficially become the "relationship guys," dropping bug reports and renewal risks in Slack, while Engineering, Customer Success, and Support are taking care of everything post-sale "as an extra mission." Nobody has intentionally built things this way. It’s just how the company operates, after having put significant effort into making a fundable and measurable metric – let's say closed deals – but failing to implement the same rigor in post-purchase customer retention.
When I first started working in CX, I thought silos were the exception. I later thought it was just a CX problem. But then I got curious and found the data that astonished me: 83% of executives admit silos exist in their organization, and 97% say silos actively hurt the business. So this wasn't a siloed problem – it’s nearly universal! Harvard Business Review reported that 67% of collaboration failures could be attributed to organizational silos, and, oh surprise, 70% of customer service professionals named "silo mentality" as one of the key blockers in their work. I, too, have personally faced it as both a front-line agent and Vice President of a CX department. So, Betts's Slack story isn't an anomaly – it is the median experience, quantified!
The Disconnect
Sales is compensated for closing, Customer Support is compensated for troubleshooting and customer satisfaction (which is recently turning into a vanity metric), while Customer Success is compensated for retention and revenue expansion. When they fail to communicate about it, the customer is not the only one who suffers from the disconnect; the team suffers from it as well, as it is a part of collaboration (or its absence) and cross-functional synergy. Here are some stats to highlight it: In one CX study, only 29% of respondents claimed they were collaborating towards common customer experience goals, while 40% didn't feel supported due to conflicting priorities of their department from everybody else. Meanwhile, the customer is never experiencing "two departments." To quote Betts in her newsletter:"Customers don't think of a company as a bunch of teams – we are our logos to them." My favorite part: Sales, CX, Product, Marketing – all of this is just AcmeCorp.
Why this is a Leadership Issue
And here is where my life purpose kicks in: I challenge (bad) leadership. And since silos aren't particularly created by either of these departments but by leadership, they are, therefore, a downstream effect. In turn, cross-functional collaboration is never an accident: It requires leaders to make the case for it and personally own the agenda, according to Vijay Govindarajan of Tuck School of Business in Harvard Business Review. So, if it is a leadership issue, what can leaders do to tackle it?
Where breaking Silos actually starts
As you may have guessed, there are no magic tools or aspirational leadership retreats to help us here. We need to start with the executive team addressing their own collaboration gap first, as we cannot expect our team to behave in a way opposite to what we, as leaders, are role modeling. Practically speaking, in a CX environment, it means implementing the following:
Shared customer outcomes metrics at executive level, not just the departmental KPIs, so that Sales, CX, and Product leadership are responsible for the same numbers.
Standing cross-functional review owned by the leadership team, where retention, reasons for churn, and roadmap decisions are discussed based on the same set of data, rather than recreated from scratch based on the squeaky wheel or, worse, "vibes-based guesses."
Naming ownership of the seams, especially post-purchase ones, as exactly the gap flagged by Betts as the reason behind the mysterious churn.
McKinsey's three-step model is a clear framework for making CX a company-wide effort, not just owned by one department. The three steps are:
Aspire (design principles)
Architect (blueprint)
Act (new operating rhythm)
But the key is: It’s only effective if it is done starting from the leadership table, as the blueprint won't mean anything without executive-level ownership. And that’s something I’ve been preaching from within (as the leader of CX departments and executive owner of client experience) and as a coach and advisor: Client experience needs to be owned by all leaders in the company, not just one. For me, that’s the first step to breaking down silos.
