The Death of Departments?

The dynamic between separate company communication-oriented departments truly began to fascinate me during the blizzard over the Holidays this past year.  Some airlines, for example, were highly responsive to Twitter, while their email and phone support generated quite a bit of negative customer feedback.  I found feedback on a railway company that was almost the opposite.  And various airlines communicated very differently, in positive and negative ways, through their PR and Marketing channels.

Traditional communication departments are fairly well known to everyone:  Public Relations, Marketing, Customer Support and even the relative newcomers of Community Relations and Social Media.  The first three, at least, have had their roles and responsibilities defined over many years throughout almost every industry.  The latter two have become the subjects of many debates, presentations, lectures, white papers and blog posts debating their optimum roles and places in various organizations, especially in the game industry.

The upshot of all this is not about specific instances of where Twitter saved the day or where PR reps posting on Facebook infuriated stranded travelers, but rather the big picture of disunity in communications by almost every company involved in dealing with that blizzard.  And that is just a situational example, pulled from a unique situation where many companies had to address the same type of problems at the same time.  The theme of fragmented communications cuts across every industry, as companies of all sizes grapple with the increasing speed and openness of Business-to-Customer interactions.

I once had a boss tell me, “Don’t come to me with a problem unless you have some inkling of a possible solution.”  While I wouldn’t propose to solve everyone’s problems in a blog post, the answer to this particular issue is basic in its overview, though no doubt highly complex in its implementation:  Unification.

In the not-distant past, a customer support enquiry was typically between the customer and the company, represented by a Customer Support Representative, for example.  In the age of social media, these interactions can be highly public, through Facebook, Twitter or other platforms.  Does your CS department have ownership of your social media initiatives?  It is highly doubtful.  How high up the company org chart do you have to go before your communication channels are unified?  While it is not practical to envision a communications department of any size where “everybody does everything” – specializations such as Marketing, PR, Social Media, etc. need to be recognized – it is possible to scope out an organization structured from the bottom up to unify a company’s message across all platforms.

Cross-training of Customer Support Representatives to effectively handle issues coming through social media is just one place to start.  Moving up the chain, it’s feasible to believe that Marketing, Community and PR managers working under the same departmental structure would be more efficient and knowledgeable of company-wide issues than if they were ensconced in separate and siloed structures.  Every company, of course, will have unique challenges in their own particular industry.  However, if the Marketing / PR / Customer Support model of communications has been standard across industries for so long, there is no reason to believe that a new model could not take its place.

The truly interesting factor that has brought about a need for change is, as mentioned above, social media.  While many companies view social media as another communication silo, my belief is that it will come to be seen as a sort of organizational glue, tying all communication-oriented departments together.  Companies that adapt to and utilize this new dynamic will be building a competitive advantage for themselves, and those are the companies that will be prepared for the next great “blizzard.”

-Rich Weil