How to fix a siloed system

Have you ever tried to complete a jigsaw puzzle without all the pieces? That’s what it’s like to run a business with siloed systems.

Business data is critical in every industry, but if it’s siloed across departments, teams, and people—that is, if your puzzle pieces are scattered across your home—you may never figure out how to make that information work for you. Left unaddressed, this fragmentation can eventually undermine customer trust, brand integrity, and employee retention, severely impacting your business goals.

True integration isn’t just about building more efficient systems: It’s about centering the entirety of your customer’s needs in every system you build. From my time as CEO of Sollis Health, as well as my background creating seamless, loyalty-building customer experiences across industries, here’s what I’ve learned how to connect vital data points, ultimately breaking these silos.

FRAGMENTATION FRUSTRATES YOUR CUSTOMER

In traditional healthcare, patients are shuttled between clinics, hospitals, and specialists, and each stop possesses only part of their medical record. If this gap between providers isn’t closed, medical data falls through the cracks, causing confusion, inconvenience, and even negative health outcomes.

Other industries face a similar challenge: Siloed customer data in banking, retail, and fitness makes the customer experience more confusing and difficult, impacting loyalty and damaging brands. Take the travel industry, for years frequent travelers of franchised hotels were unable to immediately access their folios, which are itemized records of all charges incurred during their stay, via hotel apps or websites. It’s only been within the past five or so years that many hotels integrated their systems and resolved this problem.

Like pushing together two puzzle pieces that don’t fit, poor integration creates friction and weakens the bond between your brand and your customer. Damage that bond and you damage the brand. As a result, trust erodes and loyalty declines, and what could have been a lasting relationship is reduced to a one-time transaction.

SYSTEM INTEGRATION REVIVES BRAND LOYALTY

Of course, integrating siloed systems is easier said than done. Shortsighted thinkers may regard this process as merely a perk or upgrade, not a loyalty strategy. But any situation where customers are left to connect their own dots leaves them feeling unseen and underserved. That “unseen” feeling has tangible results. If you don’t consider qualitative feedback as valuable as operational data, you run the risk of overlooking a vital opportunity to connect the dots for customers and secure their loyalty.

Consumers are increasingly willing to share medical and personal data if it improves outcomes, according to this McKinsey report. Integration that’s seamless and private isn’t just welcomed but increasingly in demand. At Sollis, we fulfill that demand (and put our data to good use) with Qualtrics, which harnesses the power of AI to review and summarize qualitative, free-form feedback. Instead of using guesswork to improve the customer experience, this vital feedback guides our next move, whether that’s adding additional benefits to a membership tier or opening in a new market.

System integration is more than streamlining or maintenance. An investment in an entirely new technology system can enhance trust between you and your customer if it enables you to remember their preferences and history. This signals that you understand them, making it possible to anticipate their needs, deliver a seamless experience, and build the kind of loyalty that lasts.

CONNECT the dots for your customers

Frustrated by their jigsaw puzzle, some business leaders make the mistake of passing on their incomplete set of pieces to the consumer. Siloed systems push the burden onto the customer, whether it’s a patient managing their own referrals or a hotel guest juggling multiple logins. Business leaders seeking to relieve customers of the burden of being their own managers must build systems that anticipate their needs and then address those needs proactively through seamless, personalized solutions.

Sometimes, the solution is as simple as a tech upgrade. Sollis recently adopted Metriport, a tool that (with a patient’s explicit consent) pulls data from the Health Information Exchange national database, then uses AI to summarize key conditions, allergies, recent scans, and other medical data. This gives our clinicians a brief but thorough view of a member’s medical history prior to their appointment, providing a more coordinated care experience that saves time for clinicians and patients alike, while streamlining treatment. Our patients don’t have to spend their time tracking down a lifetime’s worth of medical records every time they need care, and our clinicians are at far less risk of overlooking key data that could impact decision-making.

Siloed systems don’t just slow operations: they fail your customers, often at critical junctions in the customer experience. True integration is not a back-end fix, but a tool for understanding your customer holistically. When companies connect the dots, they move from treating customers as transactions to recognizing them as people.

Like a completed puzzle, the picture finally comes into focus.

Brad Olson is CEO of Sollis Health.