Customer Confidential: Untold Stories of Earned Growth - Ep. 171: Gillian Tett of the Financial Times | Stop Busting Silos; Instead, Make Them Work for You

Ep. 171: Gillian Tett of the Financial Times | Stop Busting Silos; Instead, Make Them Work for You

01/23/20 • 37 min

Customer Confidential: Untold Stories of Earned Growth

Silos are deeply rooted in human nature. We should stop complaining about them and instead ask: How can we harness the tribal behavior that generates silos to create value for customers? To learn more, I turned to Gillian Tett of the Financial Times. Her book, The Silo Effect: The Peril of Expertise and the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers, explores the role of silos in the financial crisis and in our everyday lives. “Silos exist for the very simple reason that we’re human,” she says.

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Ep. 170: Airbnb’s Raj Sivasubramanian | Will Customers Really Leave Feedback via Video?

In this podcast, Raj Sivasubramanian, customer experience insights manager at Airbnb, explains how Airbnb is experimenting with a system that makes it easy for customers to provide video feedback. I admit, I was skeptical. But Raj explains why that often provides longer, more detailed and often richly emotional feedback. More important, he says, when transmitted directly to frontline employees and leaders, that emotion often generates the sort of empathy that inspires and motivates thoughtful action.

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Ep. 172: UniCredit's Francesco Vercesi | With Agile, Customer Experience Improvements Never End

How does a banking group operating in multiple countries accelerate improvements in customer experience, particularly digital improvements, while still meeting the unique needs of individual countries? This was the challenge facing UniCredit, and the topic of my podcast with Francesco Vercesi, UniCredit's head of Agile, practice sharing and customer service. The answer, as his title implies, was to create a centralized Agile process, but with product owners in each country empowered to set their development priorities.