The Hidden Tax That's Quietly Costing Your Business a Fortune

Silos are the silent killer of customer experience — but for years we've only argued that from one side of the coin: the customer's. This episode flips it over. Colin and Ryan are joined by Dan O'Connell, CEO of Front, to look at silos from the side that actually moves a boardroom — the cost.

Front's new research, the Coordination Tax, surveyed B2B customer service, operations, and account management leaders and uncovered a startling baseline: the typical company spends nearly three hours coordinating work for every one hour it spends actually solving a customer's problem. Worse, 42% of companies don't track coordination time at all. It's the single largest cost in most customer operations, and almost nobody is measuring it.

Dan, Colin, and Ryan dig into why sophisticated software and AI have so far made the problem worse rather than better, why bolting AI onto broken processes just delivers "a bad job done faster," what the top 14% of companies do differently, and the practical steps any leader can take to start quantifying — and shrinking — their own coordination tax.

What You'll Learn

• Why silos cost you twice: once in customer experience, and once in raw internal inefficiency you're probably not measuring

• The three-to-one coordination-to-solving ratio, and why "normal" is far more expensive than leaders assume

• Why more advanced platforms and AI have inherited the coordination gap and scaled it

• The human cost: how coordination burnout quietly drives your best people out the door

• What separates the top 14% of companies from everyone else

• Practical first moves — measuring coordination, aligning cross-functional incentives, documenting the real process, and starting small with AI

Memorable Quote

"Teams are working around broken systems. AI won't fix that. Until companies address the coordination gap, the problem won't go away." — Dan O'Connell, CEO, Front

Resources Mentioned

The Coordination Tax report is free to download at Front - Coordination Tax

About the Guest

Dan O'Connell is the CEO of Front, the customer operations platform built for B2B complexity. Before Front, Dan was the Chief Strategy & AI Officer at Dialpad, where he delivered the first set of generative AI features powered by Dialpad's proprietary large language model.

Since joining as CEO in March 2024, Dan has repositioned Front from a shared inbox tool to a category-leading platform for complex customer operations, leading the company past $100M in ARR in September 2025. More than 9,300 businesses rely on Front, which has raised $204M in venture funding from Sequoia Capital, Salesforce Ventures, Battery Ventures, Threshold Ventures, and Uncork Capital, as well as executives from Atlassian, Okta, PagerDuty, Qualtrics, and Zoom. Prior to that, Dan was the CEO of TalkIQ, a real-time speech recognition and natural language processing start-up acquired by Dialpad. Dan has also held various sales leadership positions at AdRoll and Google. He holds an MBA from the University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business.Follow Dan on LinkedIn

About the Hosts

Colin Shaw is a LinkedIn 'Top Voice' with a massive 286,000 followers a