Most organizations organize their customer experience operations into separate boxes which function as individual units. The Customer Experience team functions as the organizational leader which directs all customer journey operations. Customer Success owns the relationship. Customer Support owns the problems. The different teams operate with their own set of responsibilities and performance indicators and management structures and operational resources.
The building design shows proper scale relationships through its internal spaces when viewed from within. The outside design of the structure does not create any logical connection between its individual elements.
The organization operates its customer experience without interruption because it runs its different operational sections independently. They experience a company. The company loses customer trust when it presents different messages to different people.
The growing number of organizations faces an execution risk because their Customer Experience (CX) and Customer Success and Customer Support functions have become fragmented during 2026.
The designers of CX and CS and Support systems intended these functions for separate purposes rather than customer service. The system ran according to its established operational parameters.
Organizations needed to scale their operations, so they established different departments for specialized work. The task needed people to bring distinct abilities to the work. The solution needed distinct procedures to solve each separate problem. The functions evolved into specialized roles which became more formalized while they lost their initial connection to each other.
The teams worked to achieve their individual success targets.
The CX team concentrated on customer perception and journey experiences and their level of engagement.
The CS team focused on obtaining new customers while they kept their existing customer base through their work on relationship maintenance and renewal operations.
The support team dedicated their work to ticket management while they tracked both ticket response times and the number of tickets they successfully resolved.
The performance of each function as an individual unit experienced improvement. The entire experience broke into separate parts.
The customers right away detected these missing features. A smooth onboarding followed by rigid support. The CS manager who assists others must operate under existing rules which create specific boundaries for his actions. A support agent unaware of commitments made earlier in the relationship.
No single team failed. The system did.
Silos become dangerous not when things go wrong, but when they go wrong repeatedly.
A customer contacts support because their ongoing problem continues to exist. The solution of Support fixes the current issue, yet it fails to solve what led to the problem. Customer Success learns about this problem after it happens but without any background information.
The CX dashboards show positive customer sentiment because surveys become available at predetermined times only.
The organization runs in defensive mode because there are no indications that its strategies reach its customer segment. The organization has received all the work that each team was responsible for.
The most dangerous type of failure occurs when no person takes responsibility for the failure.
The pattern spread throughout the world during 2025. The growth period brought about an increase in the amount of interaction that took place. Complexity multiplied. The customer needed to work with different teams during their entire interaction process. The shift change process led to problems which always occurred.
The lack of ability to establish ownership rights resulted in trust failures between parties who had no actual problems.
Businesses receive their customer judgments through the delivery of consistent experiences which do not reveal their actual business intentions.
Leadership teams continue to believe that having good intentions will make up for their inability to execute tasks consistently. They do not.
Organizations need to show their customers their actions because customers evaluate their performance through actual results instead of stated intentions.
Customers will avoid asking questions when they get different responses from various teams. The team loses confidence because they need to escalate all their work to achieve their targets. When they feel they must manage the vendor relationship actively, the partnership becomes transactional.
This is not a failure of empathy. It is a failure of integration.
Organizations encounter rising difficulties to keep their operations running in sync during their growth because their decision-making systems evolve into intricate multi-level systems.
The different functions within an organization will establish their own sets of essential tasks.
The main objective of CX initiatives involves how customers perceive their experiences. The main goal of CS involves maintaining student enrollment. The main goal of Support operations involves achieving maximum operational efficiency. The systems have different priorities which cause conflicts because they operate without sharing a unified execution system.
In many organizations, there is no single owner of the end-to-end customer experience. The distribution of responsibility results in fragmented responsibility which becomes difficult to manage.
The present reward structures have established separate systems which operate independently from each other. The system provides rewards to teams which achieve their best local performance results instead of working toward complete organizational success. A quick solution to ticket problems will damage what customers think about our service. A renewal that costs the maximum amount will generate additional support expenses which need to be paid. Organizations implement positive onboarding procedures which help them hide their actual delivery capacity restrictions.
Executive alignment serves as the missing link which prevents silos from achieving their intended purpose of local optimization.
The expenses from customer experience fragmentation exist as individual entries which do not appear together in financial reports. It shows up indirectly.
Forecasts become less reliable.
Expansion takes longer.
The organization faces increasing support expenses which do not lead to better customer satisfaction results.
Customer Success starts to defend its position instead of using strategic approaches.
Most dangerously, leadership loses a clear line of sight into customer reality. The information flow between teams undergoes three main transformations which include filtering and delay and reinterpretation of signals.
Executive-level problems start as operational disturbances which then evolve into organizational threats after others become aware of them.
Teams need to preserve their separate functions during silo breakdown because they should not need to combine their work activities. The concept requires organizations to establish new systems which determine how accountability operates.
All participants need to take responsibility for achieving common goals before they can begin the integration process. Not shared awareness, shared accountability.
The team needs to create a common understanding about customer success definition methods. The process needs teams to establish mutual agreement about when they should raise problems and what methods to use for escalation.
The system requires full transparency between departments because staff member transfers of work need to prevent vital information from becoming lost.
Leadership needs to take control of customer experience because it exists as a complete system which requires unified management instead of treating it as individual operational duties.
Systems have inputs, outputs, and feedback loops. They can be optimized only when viewed holistically.
No number of cross-functional meetings will solve fragmentation if leadership does not model integration.
Executives who maintain CX and CS and Support functions as individual areas cause their teams to operate independently from each other. Leaders who delay until problems reach their peak will observe their teams split into independent groups. Organizations lose their sense of responsibility because there are no established mechanisms to hold them accountable.
Leadership should make integration its fundamental leadership practice for 2026.
Leaders need to ask questions which differ from standard inquiries. The system failure point requires identification instead of determining which team maintains control of this asset.
The investigation needs to find out what led the customer to require help instead of studying the failure of support services to fix their problem. The organization needs to stop future incidents from happening instead of trying to reduce the number of support tickets.
The organization needs to shift its operations from reactive responses to learning-based operations through these inquiry points.
A unified system which links CX to CS and Support functions enables customers to access immediate benefits.
They feel it in smoother transitions.
The team identifies this pattern because they keep sending the same responses.
They experience it through their active exchange of information.
Teams solve problems at a fast pace because they share context information directly between them instead of requiring long working hours. Customers stop repeating themselves. The escalation process seems to achieve a particular objective instead of
generating conflict between the involved parties.
People develop their confidence through direct life experiences because these experiences hold special value for them.
At International Executive Consulting, we are often brought in when leadership teams’ sense that customer-facing functions are working hard but not working together.
The organization dedicates its efforts to eliminate operational barriers which exist between different teams. The organization helps leaders to change ownership systems through performance-based incentive programs which create unified operational systems between Customer Experience and Customer Success and Support departments.
The main goal does not involve creating an organization that looks perfect. It is customer trust.
The organization does not need to worry about customer interest in team structures.
The company needs to function as a single entity according to them.
And in 2026, organizations that cannot present a unified experience will struggle to scale — no matter how talented their individual teams may be.
Author: Sandrine Moreau
At International Executive Consulting, we excel in driving business transformation and organizational change - enhancing corporate performance while optimizing efficiency.