Silos suck. We all know it. They make creating a positive customer experience harder because we don’t know what our colleagues are doing, how we can help them and how they can help us. And it annoys the hell out of our customers. It makes them feel like we don’t know them or care about their needs.
Which isn’t true.
And that’s why the last few years has been all about sales, marketing and customer service alignment. We’ve realised all our customer-facing teams need to be working towards making a great customer experience. And so we’ve been busy breaking marketing, sales and customer service out of their customer experience-suppressing silos and working in lockstep with each other.
That’s gotten great results. Businesses doing it well are seeing the benefits of sales and marketing alignment: more bang for their marketing buck, seeing their sales conversions go up and making sure customer issues are dealt with quickly.
If you’re in one of these businesses – or you’re becoming one of them – you’ve earned the right to feel very pleased with yourself. Alignment has been a game-changer and the companies that aren’t doing it are very quickly going to find their customers hightailing it to competitors who make them feel like they matter.
But the work of creating a great customer experience is never done. And we think you can go even further than alignment.
For the businesses that truly, madly, deeply care about giving their customers a great experience, there’s a new game in town. It’s called convergence, and it means your customer-facing people don’t just work together, they work as one.
Sales, Service and Marketing are converging . The point of intersection is customer experience from Salesforce
Next-level alignment
Convergence isn’t really a new game at all – it’s the logical extension of alignment, and it makes sure you get the maximum value from all the work you did in smashing up those silos.
It’s about taking your already-aligned teams and turning them into a well-oiled revenue machine where marketers spot cross-sell opportunities, salespeople solve customers’ problems and your service guys come up with kick-ass marketing ideas based on what they hear from talking to customers all day.
Take a look at the Slideshare to find out how you go from being aligned to converged – and the great things that’s going to mean for your customers and your business.
Ready to start creating those great customer experiences? Download this insightful and practical Creating a Connected Customer Experience guide.
