Four Ways to Smash Down Silos and Boost Contact Center Performance

4 minute read

Upland Admin

If the overall goal of a modern contact center is to provide the best possible experience for the customer, then dated silos need to go.

Today, a contact center works best when information is shared openly between departments, and employees are able to collaborate and work more productively without limitations. Though silos may have served a purpose in the past, now they merely hinder progress and effective customer service.

It’s essential that any contact center looking to improve overall performance and to deliver the kind of service that’s going to meet the demands of the modern customer breaks down their silo mentality. With this in mind, we have created a list of top tips on how you can improve your contact center performance and create an environment that is free from silo-based barriers.

Unite your contact center team under one vision

Goals are the path to success, but if several departments within your contact center are each working towards a different purpose, conflicts of interest within your organization are bound to occur. Managers from separate departments, for instance, will drive their team towards a unique goal and, as a result, won’t see a need to share information with other divisions in the organization. The result? A siloed environment where collaboration is limited and the company’s long-term goals are overlooked.

By unifying the company under one single vision, managers within separate departments can focus on the same goal and drive their teams forward in the same direction. This strategy will produce better results for the entire organization, and not just individual sections of it.

Use collaboration tools

To reach shared success, collaboration tools are crucial so that business leaders can communicate with the entire company. Managers need to explain organizational goals, describe what employees should be doing to ensure the goals are met and communicate growth achieved for these goals.

Typically, a customer relationship management (CRM) platform is used to improve collaboration in the contact center as it offers dashboards that allow the entire company to see sales metrics and progress towards common goals. Plus, with the addition of a computer telephony integration platform, this collaboration can be taken even further by providing a single pane of glass solution where data can be harnessed from every entry point in the omni-channel contact center. As a result, the CRM can be used to improve employee performance and the customer experience.

Train across departments

By training all employees together with a complete program that provides education on every aspect of the business, silo mentality can be drastically reduced and a business can unite employees together on a shared path. In these training sessions, each employee will be aware of what it is they must do in their own role, but they will also learn the importance of collaboration and how sharing information with other departments will help drive success forward for the company as a whole.

Take, for example, the relationship between the sales and marketing departments. Though the two are mutually exclusive and employees have different skill sets, their goals are very similar. Creating an environment where these two departments understand each other and work in unison will be hugely beneficial for overall productivity and performance.

Encourage regular communication

Though the existence of separate departments within an organization is, by definition, a siloed practice, it doesn’t mean that these different sectors should be denied the opportunity to regularly communicate and share information, opinions and ideas. To abolish silos entirely would mean to unify all of these different departments together into one, which isn’t really feasible. Contact centers need to be divided into different sections to handle different areas of the business and unifying them all would be a chaotic move.

However, rather than eradicating these separate departments, it’s much more useful to ensure they keep in regular communication and maintain an open dialogue on business goals.

One way to do this is to open an inter-departmental group on a messaging platform so that employees from different areas of the business can regularly update one another on performance and collaborate in real-time to ensure the best possible outcomes.

Final advice on smashing silos and improving contact center performance

If you take anything away from this article, it should be the thought that collaboration between all departments within the contact center is essential in the modern market. No business can afford to make the mistake of ignoring this fact. By creating an environment where information flows freely and all employees are operating on the same page, a business is able to improve their contact center performance and can make actionable changes to ensure the customer experience is consistently positive.

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