A telecoms customer does not experience your business in functions. They walk into a store, open an app, call care, upgrade a device, ask about fibre, pay a bill, check a bundle, take finance, wait for an installation, then complain about an outage. To them it is one journey. To the business, it is a relay race where half the runners have never met.

The customer does not care about any of this. They only care whether it works.

That is the whole argument in two sentences, so let me put the commercial version plainly. Telecoms businesses rarely fail to move forward because they lack smart people, big systems or another steering committee named after a military operation. They fail because the customer journey moves sideways while the business still thinks vertically. Retail owns one part, digital owns another, care inherits the mess, IT gets blamed for the thing nobody specified, finance guards the margin, and marketing runs the campaign. Nobody owns the join.

This is why breaking down silos is not a soft culture project. It is a revenue, cost-to-serve and brand-trust issue. Every broken handover shows up somewhere real: a lost sale in store, a repeat call into care, a device financed but never activated, a bundle sold but never installed. The customer feels one experience. The P&L feels six departments pulling in different directions.

For telecoms executives: stop treating this as someone else's problem

Silos are not the enemy. Telecoms is complicated, and a business without functional expertise is just a motivational poster with a payroll. IT should care about architecture, finance about margin, retail about conversion, care about repeat contact, digital about adoption. The trouble starts when every department optimises its own world and quietly assumes the customer will stitch the experience together for free.

Take a common example. Retail is asked to drive app adoption, but the app is poor, the login is painful, the incentive is wrong, and care still sends customers into stores for tasks the app should handle. That is not a retail problem. Retail is simply the last human face in a badly designed journey. Or stores are asked to sell mobile, TV, fibre and streaming together, but the systems are disconnected, the product rules are confusing and the incentive plan still rewards the easiest mobile upgrade. That is not a sales capability gap. It is an operating model issue wearing a retail symptom.

The executive question that matters is a simple one: is the room big enough for the problem? If it is not, widen it. Not by inviting half the company to a weekly meeting where everyone nods and secretly answers email, but by bringing in the people who own the real handovers. Who owns the customer message? Who owns the system step? Who owns the advisor behaviour? Who owns the incentive? Who owns the post-sale failure? Who owns the data that proves whether the journey worked?

The warning signs are usually obvious once you know what to look for. Everyone agrees there is a problem, but nobody agrees whose problem it is. A project is called retail transformation, yet digital, care, HR, IT and finance are nowhere near the design. Someone says the team just needs more training, when the process itself is failing. Procurement appears before the problem has even been shaped. The team asks for one more deck, which usually means they are avoiding the decision rather than sharpening the thinking.

Executives should step in when the same issue keeps surfacing under different names in different departments. Low conversion, poor app adoption, repeat calls, weak NPS, slow transactions and margin leakage look like six separate problems. More often they are one broken journey wearing six different hats.

There is also a point where leaders need to back off. Once the right people are in the room, the journey is owned and the team has authority to decide, the job of leadership is to unblock, not to hover. Nothing kills momentum faster than a senior person who demands empowerment, then reopens every decision because they had a thought in the car.

This is the work I am most often pulled into with operators, and it is the part an outsider can genuinely help with. Free of the internal politics and reporting lines, it is far easier to gather the right people and force honest alignment on the issues everyone can see but nobody wants to own.

For vendors: your champion is not the whole business

For those of us selling into telecoms, there is an equal and opposite mistake. We fall in love with the champion. The champion gets it. They feel the pain. They say things like this is exactly what we need, which is the kind of sentence that has vendors mentally decorating the signed contract.

The problem is that in telecoms your champion rarely owns the whole outcome. They may own the pain but not the budget. They may own the budget but not the systems. They may own the strategy but not the people who have to use it. They may love the idea and still have no way to get finance, IT, HR, digital, care or procurement behind it.

So the job is not to bypass them, which is clumsy and politically daft. The job is to help them widen the room without making them feel undermined. The ask should never sound like I need to meet more people because you are not enough. It should sound like this touches more than one part of the journey, and I want to protect your idea before someone blocks it later. There is a world of difference between the two.

A few questions do more work than any discovery deck. Who else will inherit this change if it goes ahead? Which department could challenge it later if we do not involve them now? And the most useful of all: where has something like this got stuck before? That last one tells you more about the real buying process than forty slides ever will.

Two anonymised examples make the point. With a wireless-only operator in the Americas, the visible issue looked like retail experience. The real problem touched brand, device finance, app adoption, advisor behaviour, transaction time and what happened on the customer's phone before they left the store. Sold as a store design or training project alone, it would have missed the point entirely. With an incumbent in Africa, strong in fixed and TV but a challenger in mobile, the brief looked like teaching stores to sell more mobile. The deeper question was how to sell convergence when the business itself still behaved like separate product kingdoms. That is not a retail problem. It is a commercial alignment problem exposed through retail.

Vendors need to spot the traps early. If your champion keeps saying leave it with me, they may be protecting you, avoiding you, or trapped themselves. If the client wants a proposal before the real stakeholders have been involved, be careful. If IT has not been in the room but the scope includes integration, you are writing fiction. If everyone loves the vision but nobody can explain the budget, you do not have a buying process. You have corporate daydreaming.

The best move a vendor can make is to become the translator. Retail talks conversion and footfall. Digital talks adoption and containment. Care talks contacts and complaints. Finance talks payback. IT talks risk and release windows. The job is not to impress everyone with your own jargon, but to build one plain-English story around the customer journey that all of them recognise.

Knowing when the room is too small, and when it is big enough to decide

Breaking silos does not mean dragging everyone into everything. That is not progress. It is calendar vandalism. It means judgement: knowing when the room is too small for the problem, and when it is finally big enough to make a decision and move.

Because the customer journey does not care about your org chart. It does not care about your reporting lines, your ownership model, your steering committees or your carefully colour-coded roadmap. In telecoms, the store and the app and the call are increasingly the only places where a complex, expensive, easily-switched product earns any trust at all. When the journey works, that trust compounds into loyalty and cross-sell. When it breaks, it leaks out as churn, repeat contacts and a bundle the customer never quite completes.

And when the experience fails, the customer will not blame the silo. They will blame the brand.