Blow Up the Silos and Achieve Consistent Customer Communications

Since I've been consulting, I've had the pleasure of doing what I call End To End reviews for several e-commerce clients. In performing an E2E review, I review all online copy and communications from a customer perspective.

As such, I take the role of the customer, typically starting at the home page, moving through the information gathering process, the product catalogue, the purchase process, the fulfillment process, the support process, the follow-up communications and customer marketing.

What I've found without exception is that at some point there is a communications breakdown where the tone or logic in the communications stream breaks down, leaving a disjointed customer experience.

These breakdowns might occur in the sales process (feature-based language on the product page turns into high pressure sales talk on the "buy" page), the fulfillment process (your ecommerce/cart vendor uses dramatically different language or contradicts what your site says up to that point), or the service process (the customer service pages feel like they are from a different company than the rest of the site).

Usually, these disjoints are caused by the fact that these different areas of the site have different "owners" who are ultimately responsible for them. These areas become their own "silos" and exist more or less independently from each other.

While this may makes sense from an internal perspective, it makes zero sense to your visitors.

How do you solve this problem? Well, unfortunately for many companies with long-established business processes, truly "blowing up" the silos is not necessarily an option. The single easiest answer is to appoint a customer advocate within the company who has the sufficient authority to oversee the continuity of c0mmunications. This might be your Director of Marketing or can be someone more junior, as long as they are senior enough (or respected enough) to get different parties within the company to get on the same page.

The tools required to perform an E2E review are not particularly sophisticated. Going through your most common customer processes, "screenshotting" your progress along the way, and making notations as you go is more or less all you need to do.

The first time you do this, I virtually guarantee you'll find and document some disconnects in your communications process that will be sufficient to get stakeholder buy-in if you present the information tactfully.

Alternatively, if you don't have the time to invest or don't have someone who can ignore the trees and see the forest, it's definitely a project worthy of bringing in help for. Either way, I have yet to see a company that does not have some serious breakdowns in their communications process, so it's definitely something you should have a look at.