Trend-Spotting: Break Down Silos by Collating Customer Feedback

Collating customer feedback can improve the efficacy and consolidate the competitive advantage of even the most siloed companies.

Though silo-based organizations – those organizations where business goals and responsibilities are distributed according to departmental lines – get a bad rap sometimes, when used properly they not necessarily a bad thing.

A lot of large companies successfully use silos to organize their large workforces, and those silos can foster expertise and promote a sense of accountability.

Unfortunately, it is difficult to see customer feedback trends across a company when the feedback is also in silos.

Break Down the Silo Walls for Better Feedback

Transparency and permeability are issues in many silo-based organizations. Information does not flow easily from one silo to another. Gathering and using customer feedback in an effective way requires information flow through silo walls.

Silo-based feedback systems focus on the biggest concerns for each department. This can cause some important insight to be lost as smaller themes in customer experience are ignored. Like a science experiment that doesn’t use a big enough group of test subjects to provide trustworthy results, getting feedback only within a silo and not across silos can limit what you learn from the data.

When you bring all of the feedback from the various silos into a single system, collating all of that feedback data, new themes emerge and trends are easier to spot. This can help you uncover opportunities you wouldn’t have seen otherwise.

The biggest problem with silo-based organizations when it comes to gathering data is the lack of visibility. The simple solution is to collate that data into a single system, which will bring all of the important feedback data to light.

The Big Benefits of Collating Data

When all feedback data is brought into a single system and information is available on a holistic scale, companies see massive benefits. Now you can:

Link a customer’s high satisfaction to the actions of a single employee
Uncover lucrative opportunities to deliver new offerings to your customer base
Proactively identify problem areas that need to be addressed
Spot trends across silos that impact a customer’s experience overall
Flag issues with a particular product or service

Get Your Company Rowing in the Same Direction

Even if a company is organized by silos, much of the collated feedback data will apply across all departments. Silo-based feedback may flag big concerns, like customer experience, but when feedback is collated the larger pool of data will bring to surface smaller trends that are just as critical to your company’s success.

For example, if 7% of your customers had an issue with pre-purchase customer care, that information could have been lost in silo-based feedback because the percentage per silo would have been too low to notice.

This 360-degree insight is a unique opportunity for you not only to get more use out of your customer feedback, but also to create a unified vision for your employees and have everyone work toward a common goal. Departmental boundaries melt and productivity increases when everyone rows in the same direction.

There is merit to the silo-based organizational structure – but to get the most out of your customer feedback, it’s time to break down those silo walls.