5 Ways to Remove Siloed Systems & Deliver an Outstanding Omnichannel Customer Experience
Silos exist everywhere - from an organizational structure to the different departments, sections, systems, or units of operation within the same company or organization. If separated and not interconnected, slows down the business to a greater extent, and significantly impacts customer experience.
This blog will discuss 5 different ways to remove siloed systems and deliver exceptional omnichannel customer experience.
How siloed systems affect companies, brands, and customers?
Creates information islands: Silos create "information islands" or isolated data that make it difficult for employees to share, analyze & match it with master data. They make it even harder for employees to find critical information & valuable insights about their customers, products, projects, and teams.
Provokes internal competition: Siloed organizations develop a culture based solely on their function. Individual silos become very protective of their resources and do not allow sharing of resources with other internal departments. Each silo becomes a separate entity, leading to a sense of competition between departments rather than collaboration.
Decreases efficiency: The presence of silos can be hazardous for your business. They are a symptom of larger organizational problems and are signs of a lack of collaboration and trust between departments and teams. It can decrease efficiency and increase time & money spent on redundant tasks.
Time & money wastage: Silos are the enemy of any organization, as they restrict information flow and make it difficult for people to work together towards a common goal. When silos exist, employees go through unnecessary rounds of communication that waste time and money.
Problems in collaborative work: A siloed organization is created by managers who do not understand the importance of collaboration or teamwork. Silos can be found in most companies due to lack of management training and negatively affect brands and companies. They create barriers between departments and sometimes even within departments.
Customers get inconsistent service: A siloed company gives inconsistent service to their customers. Customers expect good communication and seamless service no matter what platform they use to connect a retail brand.
Ways to remove siloes from retail business and deliver an exceptional omnichannel customer experience
1) Create cross-functional teams to improve customer experience
Cross-functional teams have professionals from diverse backgrounds and skill sets. These teams in a retail firm can have team members with inventory management, business analyst, and software development experience. They can also include members of different levels like store managers, team leaders, sales associates, warehouse managers etc.
Such a diverse team can help increase efficiency, innovation and promote the organization's goals by focussing on a unified goal. Without a cross-functional team, disputes and a resulting increase in trade-offs may happen, drastically worsening the customer experience.
For example, the IT team of a retail brand may be in charge of making web pages load faster, but marketing might need more features and functionality to sell people on a high-end purchase like expensive jewellery or casual shoes. Taking away some of that content to meet page load-time goals could be bad for the business.
If there isn't a good collaboration between different departments of the company, the app experience and the bottom line both can suffer, thereby justifying the need for cross-functional teams to streamline tasks and improve on-page customer experience.
2) Streamline information to ensure its consistency
When people work for a company, they should talk about its products and mission quickly, effectively and flawlessly. Setting up a readily available information source can make it easier to efficiently share the latest company updates & happenings.
For example, if a company starts a new marketing campaign, giving employees access to this information as soon as it happens will ensure that the campaign gets executed in retail stores on time. The availability of simplified information from a central source would help employees stay updated on the product, company events, and different brands. Such a crucial step helps employees avoid confusion or rumours and assists in doing their jobs better.
Example: Zipline is an operations platform built for retail that combines store communications and task management to drive flawless execution of retail store operations. It takes the barrage of messages and tasks that retail workers are bombarded with and makes them succinct, digestible, and actionable. The right people get the correct information at the right time to serve customers effortlessly.
3) Use an effective team collaboration software
Siloed systems can affect team performance and put a full stop to efforts of fostering a collaborative culture, directly impacting the customer experience. It can be tough to train, work, collaborate and communicate with an entire team of employees working remotely in far-off locations.
A centralized team collaboration software like MangoApps can help in transparent employee communication and collaboration. It can also act as a training hub to bring together employees working across various office locations and provide them with the needed tools to communicate and collaborate efficiently.
Here is how cross-team collaboration benefits customer experience:
- Increased customer retention & loyalty
- Improved customer satisfaction and engagement
- Reduced costs for customer success & marketing
- More customer advocacy and word-of-mouth marketing
4) Use centralized customer service to remove operational silos
Customer experience teams feel threatened by disconnected software and lack visibility into the customer journey. Data silos result in disconnected consumer experiences, increasing customer attrition. An omnichannel customer support software helps overcome the silo mentality and gives agents as much context as possible.
An omnichannel help desk like Freshdesk helps route inquiries to the relevant people, eliminating annoying delays caused by information transmitted across the teams. Additionally, transparency is gained by viewing the ticket and the customer's history of engagement which helps understand each query in the context of the customer's overall history of interactions with the team – allowing retailers to provide tailored experiences to each customer.
5) Ensure inventory information is the same everywhere
Retailers have to make sure that customers don't have to go through the whole process of shopping online and paying for a product only to find out that it isn't in stock. It is essential to make sure that the inventory information is the same, both online and offline. It means that both your store's online and offline departments should use the same database to keep track of your inventory.
Using Fynd omnichannel management suite, retailers can break silos within the organization effectively, as it assists in setting up a centralized inventory, logistic management, order management system and helps fulfill shopping aspirations of a customer using smart Endless Aisle Solutions – a unique technology to shop in-store and deliver genuine products directly at the customer’s home.
Fynd’s centralised omnichannel OMS is a great platform for Retail Heads, Merchandising Heads, E-commerce Heads, Omnichannel Heads, Warehouse staff and Store Associates to have a unified glance of all orders placed on all marketplaces, brand website, as well as all brand stores on a single platform.
It is highly efficient in removing siloed information across all platforms as it presents the data centrally in form of insightful & customisable dashboards. Each stakeholder can view the needful data from the central pool as and when needed. They can track daily orders, store open orders, ageing-store processing, fulfillment performance, fulfillment performance TAT, returns, cancellation, order data etc.
Conclusion
We hope you enjoyed our article about ways to remove siloed systems and deliver a great customer experience. The way businesses have functioned in the past has been siloed, which is why many firms are now evaluating omnichannel solutions to deliver a consistent consumer experience.
If you are one of them on the lookout, Connect with Fynd today to explore how we can assist you in transitioning from a siloed company to an omnichannel retail business. Fynd is trusted by over 600 brands & 10,000 stores and specializes in transforming growth-hungry retail brands into successful omnichannel brands. Click Here to arrange a demo immediately!
