How to break down the barriers between marketing, sales and customer services

When company departments do not communicate with each other, or communication is only partial or ineffective, appropriate solutions must be adopted to remedy this. In particular, the key is integration between the marketing, sales and customer service departments. This is essential for any modern business to, among other benefits, better engage with customers and stand out from competition.

Internal and external problems between company departments

In the majority of businesses, there can be a certain lack of communication and synergy between departments, which puts the company’s entire activity at risk. For many years, it was believed that marketing activities could be conducted separately from sales activities – this turned out to be a flawed belief and is now rather outdated.

Working on that basis, every department acquires a different relationship with the customers, without capitalising on data available for strategic purposes. Conversely, it is essential to ensure that information flows well, employing dynamic processes between marketing, sales and customer services.

The customer experience (CX) must provide the right information to each company player so that the business model can be built and adapted to ensure an optimal customer experience. Therefore, gaps between internal departments must be bridged, implementing solutions to simplify company processes and make them consistent.

How to develop perfectly integrated company structures

The most effective way to optimise company processes is to achieve full integration of the departments, by adopting multichannel and centralised structures. Customer Communication Management (CCM) solutions can help you to do this, breaking down barriers inside and outside the company, and encouraging communication between the marketing, sales and customer service departments.

Today, technology enables companies to build integrated systems, linking all communication channels in an optimal and automatic manner. Adequate digital structures must form the basis of the process. They must facilitate the sharing, analysis and use of the data they contain to achieve the company's objectives

Procedures must be constantly updated, following a dynamic model that can be adapted to all requirements. Everything must revolve around the customer experience and each department must act in harmony with the others. It is important to use all the collected feedback, by tracing each interaction in order to plan strategies that are shared between the sales and marketing teams.