You book a flight online. A week later, a marketing email offers you a discount on the trip you already paid full price for. At the airport, the support agent can’t see your complaint. After the trip, you fill out a survey. Days pass and you hear nothing back.
This is an all-too-common reality; it’s what a broken customer experience looks like in practice.
Over half (54%) of U.S. consumers say customer experience at most companies needs improvement.
The real problem isn’t just bad technology. It’s teams working in isolation. Marketing chasing clicks. Support handling escalated items. Research collecting feedback that no one has the time to read. Every department is pulled in different and isolated directions.
Silos today aren’t just software problems. They’re people problems, process problems, and perspective problems. They’re why even strong companies miss the mark on exceptional customer experiences.
To fix it, it’s not enough to wire systems together. You need to wire understanding together across insights, operations, and digital teams. How can you get everyone moving toward a common goal of delivering better human experiences, every time? Let’s take a look.
From data to action: The insights silo problem
Research teams run surveys. CX leaders track NPS. Someone else pulls a quarterly report. Insights exist—but they stay trapped inside the teams that collected them, never reaching the people making day-to-day decisions.
It’s a familiar symptom of siloed thinking. The real cost runs deeper: disconnected strategies, wasted budgets, and missed chances to earn customer loyalty when it matters most.
When understanding gets stuck inside a department, it stops being useful. One business unit commissions a new study instead of using what’s already known. Sales teams miss out on relevant customer feedback that could close deals faster. Leaders chase ambitious goals built on assumptions instead of real voices.
It’s not just a process flaw; it’s a culture flaw. A silo mentality treats insights like property, not a shared tool for better outcomes.
Fixing it means doing more than circulating reports. It takes a shift from isolated projects to a living, connected view of customers — one that moves easily across organizational silos and straight into action.
That’s where smarter systems come in. With Text Analytics and AI Summarize, Forsta’s HX Platform makes insights accessible the moment they’re needed.
Recommended reading – AI summaries vs. Text Analytics: how to use both in customer feedback
Teams don’t have to wait for quarterly presentations. Sales, marketing, operations; every department gets what it needs to move faster and serve customers better.
Because insights only matter when they move. We make sure they do.
Operations in isolation: Why call centers need visibility and voice
Contact centers sit on a goldmine of real-time customer data. Every call, chat, and email carries clues about what customers want, need, and expect. But in too many organizations, that data goes nowhere. It never makes it upstream to shape bigger decisions.
And when that happens, you’re left with disjointed customer experiences, an apathetic culture inside support teams, and a steady drip of missed opportunities across the entire organization.
When call center agents don’t have the full customer context, they’re stuck reacting instead of solving. When insights teams don’t hear the frontline voice, they miss out on valuable insights that could sharpen products, marketing, and service strategies.
Breaking that isolation means giving agents more than scripts and surface-level data. It means building real connections between customer conversations and company actions.
A silo-free organization doesn’t just move faster. It moves smarter, and companies that master cross-functional collaboration are 3.5x more likely to outperform their peers.
In a connected system, customer support teams work with shared dashboards that capture real-time feedback loops. Agents use open-ended feedback and AI-generated summaries to spot patterns faster and solve problems sooner. And insights teams pull direct-from-the-source understanding, not just survey scores.
That’s the power of tools like AI Open Assist. Summarizing conversations at scale feeds human understanding across customer success, marketing, and product teams, turning everyday support interactions into drivers of growth.
Support should be the front line of customer success, not the last stop for complaints. When agents have a voice and visibility, they do more than close tickets—they open doors to better experiences everywhere.
Digital blind spots: Breaking down channel-centric thinking
Marketing and product teams track clicks, page views, and app downloads. They know where customers go, but not why.
That’s the digital blind spot.
When teams rely only on isolated web and application analytics, they miss the real drivers behind customer behavior. Engagement metrics alone don’t capture satisfaction, intent, or frustration. Without Voice of Customer woven into digital data, customer experience silos grow, and customer touchpoints stay disconnected.
A strong customer engagement strategy needs more than numbers. It needs relevant customer feedback tied directly to real actions. Real-time customer feedback, linked to behavior, not buried in separate reports.
The opportunity is clear: break down channel-centric thinking and combine digital behaviors with survey data and open-ended feedback to build a full Human Experience picture. It takes a shift in mentality; from optimizing channels to understanding customers.
Integrating digital Voice of Customer with behavioral data within the Forsta HX Platform helps companies see what truly drives loyalty and churn. You stop guessing at satisfaction and start acting on real customer signals.
Engagement shows you the path. Voice of Customer shows you the purpose.
The human-centered framework for breaking silos
Breaking silos isn’t just about sharing more data but building shared empathy and purpose across every team that touches the customer.
It starts with shifting the goal, not better reports or fancier dashboards. A real connection to the human experience behind every interaction.
Human experience looks at the sum of every touchpoint a customer has with your business. It evolves beyond simply seeking a transaction. It isn’t looking at only customer satisfaction, it’s recognizing a satisfied customer may not be a return customer.
Here’s what that shift looks like:
Connected data: One ecosystem where structured surveys, unstructured feedback, and behavioral data all live together. No more disjointed systems or guessing games. Just one unified view of the customer’s voice, ready for action.
Collaborative workflows: Insight hubs that cut across departments. Across research, marketing, and customer success, it means everyone working from the same real-time understanding. No more them-and-us mentality. No more fighting for control of the story.
Customer truth activation: Teams empowered to move fast. Turning fresh insights into actionable improvements that matter now, not six months from now.
Plenty of companies buy an array of technology solutions, hoping to stitch together a better approach to customer experience. But without a unified system for connection, even the best analysis tools end up reinforcing old silos.
The Forsta HX Platform changes that: It pulls feedback, behaviors, and emotions into one connected stream so your teams can see the full truth, not just snapshots. It drives real awareness of customer experience and makes it easy to turn customer satisfaction surveys, open-ended feedback, and real-time behavior into action.
What “silo-free” looks like in practice
A silo-free organization doesn’t just move faster. It moves smarter—because every team sees the full picture of the customer.
Here’s what that looks like in practice.
Customer care
A support agent picks up the phone already knowing what the customer struggled with online. Insight summaries and digital journey context surface instantly, helping the agent anticipate needs, resolve issues faster, and deliver a smoother onboarding experience.
Real-time customer feedback feeds right back into the process, closing the loop between frustration and fix.
CX and insights
A research lead stops guessing at survey questions. Instead, they refine survey design based on emerging feedback trends from the call center. They spot patterns early, before they show up as churn numbers. Surveys evolve faster, stay more relevant, and create stronger awareness of customer experience across internal stakeholders.
Digital and ops
A product team doesn’t wait for a quarterly review to react. They pivot mid-launch after spotting issues in cross-channel Voice of Customer data, combined with direct contact center feedback. They don’t just measure clicks; they measure intent, loyalty, and satisfaction, driving effective cross-team collaboration toward a unified customer experience.
Across all of these moments, the shift is clear: collaborative environment, cross-department collaboration, and action on customers happen in real time. Silo walls come down. Teams aren’t chasing isolated KPIs, they’re building consistent experiences that lead to measurable business impact and real business growth.
Breaking down silos isn’t just a mindset. It’s a daily habit. It’s built into how teams listen, share, and act — together.
Connection is the new differentiator
The companies pulling ahead today aren’t the ones with the biggest tech stacks or the most dashboards. They’re the ones that connect. The ones that move from siloed systems and scattered teams to a human-centric, insight-driven organization.
When you build real connection across insights, operations, and digital, you create faster, more empathetic, more effective customer experiences. You stop reacting and start anticipating. You move from isolated wins to a unified approach that drives lasting loyalty.
It’s not just a better approach to customer engagement, it’s the foundation of a successful customer experience transformation.
Forsta’s HX Platform makes that shift possible. It bridges the gaps between teams, touchpoints, and technologies, turning scattered feedback into a shared understanding you can act on—at scale.
If you’re ready to connect your teams around real human experience, not just better systems, it’s time to see what unified experiences can do.
