As a legacy of the way our organisations have evolved, we have created top-down management hierarchies. The legacy of this management structure is that this structure does not represent the importance of the customer and this effects the way we interact with our customers. Instead of being seamless to our customers, we represent ourselves as members of departments with a less than complete picture of the customer we are interacting with. This can be a great frustration to our customers.
Internally, we are also driven by the KPI's created using the same top-down management approach. These KPI's are usually inside out, lack a common goal with other sections within the organisation and are not aligned to the most important people to our organisation, our customers. This is no more evident than in the business and IT departments of most organisations and is typical of most inside-out companies today.
So how do we break down the silos?
Many companies are struggling with breaking down barriers and building cooperation between departments. This struggle is caused by the company-centric or channel-centric nature of our organisations and the business we do, and the lack of alignment to the customer.
In contrast to these company-centric or channel-centric organisations, Outside In companies are aligning their strategy, their business and their processes to their customers and delivering successful customers outcomes. Outside In companies know the customer experience is the process and that every time a customer interacts with their organisation, the process that followed is not bounded by internal silos. By understanding this principle, successful organisations are able to align every employee to delivering a successful customers outcome and can remove the unnecessary work that is not aligned to delivering a successful customers outcome. This significantly reduces the amount of work done and provides a set of metric which can be used as key performance indicators that are aligned to customers rather than to our organisations.
The CEMMethod
The alignment of our organisations to deliver successful customers outcomes breaks down our internal barriers and creates an environment where all employees are empowered to deliver value to customers, independent of which department they belong to. This provides motivation for all employees and breaks down the imaginary barriers we created within our organisations. The capability to break down internal silos is underpinned by the Outside In customer centric alignment of an organisation. The techniques for customer alignment are available to you through the CEMMethod. So if you are looking to break down internal silos, then our consulting and training services provide you with the techniques to achieve your goals.