By Jackie Hudson, Retail Practice Director, Enterprise Solutions, Verint® Witness Actionable Solutions®

Customer service has become a top priority for organizations, as increased economic pressures have driven the need to go above and beyond to retain existing profitable customers.  However, the different departments within the organization that influence the customer experience, such as the front-office, back-office and contact center, traditionally have not always been well integrated when it comes to sharing information, monitoring quality and tracking progress.  The combination of IP and workforce optimization (WFO) software can help break down organizational silos to align staff to meet customer needs, deliver services faster and more accurately, and provide a more consistent customer experience across channels.

Balancing the Front-Office, Back-Office and Contact Center
Despite initiatives in recent years, organizations have struggled to truly break down silos between different departments that impact customer service.  Front-office administration still often works independently from the contact center, which works independently from the back office.  The departments that make up the back office, such as order fulfillment, payment processing, loan operations and dispute resolution, all run the greatest risk of productivity bottlenecks, which in turn, impacts other service channels.  According to some experts, issues with back-office processing—data entry errors, workflow delays and billing mistakes—make up 10 to 20 percent of all the transaction volume in a contact center. 

Breaking Silos with Technology 
Workforce optimization, when combined with IP, enables organizations to capture and monitor calls and other customer interactions, and even employee desktop activity and workflow processes across channels to gain critical insights into service operations, customer behaviors and how employees are responding.  Some of the critical capabilities WFO provides can be implemented in the contact center, branch or back office to help break down silos, share information and improve overall service.  These include:

• Forecasting and scheduling — Workforce management helps organizations align employee schedules with forecasted work volumes and customer demand.

• Quality monitoring/quality assurance — Desktop PC screens and movement between applications can be recorded for analysis, focusing on conformance to policy, procedures and best practices, along with screen navigation effectiveness and overall process efficiencies.

• Performance management — Scorecards can be provided to every employee clearly indicating performance goals and the individual’s actual achievement against those objectives.  They roll up to inform team leaders, supervisors and department managers, and provide a multi-level view of performance against hierarchical goals and service operations.

• eLearning — When skill gaps are identified, eLearning delivered to the desktop is employed alongside traditional classroom training and other training techniques to counter skill or knowledge deficiencies and enable new policy rollouts in the most timely and cost-effective manner.

Putting It All Together
Workforce optimization that cuts across the contact center and front- and back-office operations is just taking off, and organizations of all kinds are already experiencing the benefits.  For example:

• Improved customer service — A small regional bank utilized workforce management to reduce in-branch wait time by almost 10 percent and increase customer satisfaction scores by five percent.  It also saved $1.5 million in operating costs by re-engineering its branch staffing mix to more effectively meet customer traffic patterns and demand.

• Faster turnaround time — A regional insurance provider was able to bring average service time down from nine to six days with forecasting and scheduling queues established to meet specific deadlines.

• Greater throughput — One of the U.S.’s largest payment processing banks was able to increase overall volume activity by 11 percent while reducing headcount by six percent, and increasing operating margins by 38 percent by implementing workforce management forecasting and scheduling.

• Improved productivity — A bill processing department of a large regional utility company improved productivity by 15 percent by monitoring the desktop activities of its employees.

How is this possible?  Imagine the customer service functions within a retail bank.  By better understanding the customer problems and resolutions identified in the contact center or the back office, a branch sales representative can be prepared to handle similar issues in the branch.  This knowledge can also enable the representative to proactively provide customers with the right education “up front” during a sales session to negate the issue altogether.  Similarly, by sharing direct customer feedback and internal productivity reporting with employees in the back office, they can better understand customer experiences and expectations and drive toward more effective service delivery that’s faster and more accurate.

Banks can also ensure they are delivering a consistent customer experience by optimizing resources to most effectively match customer demand.  For example, when there are lulls in branch walk-in traffic, branch platform personnel can be scheduled to help manage service levels in the contact center during peak periods or support back-office functions, such as loan processing to help meet deadlines and expedite service to customers.  Conversely, subject matter experts in one location can be accessed from remote branches via IP, providing on-demand services based on customers’ needs.

Technology enables organizations to make the necessary changes to create a more consistent and valued customer experienceregardless of where the customer touches the organization.  In addition, sharing customer feedback and operational insights across organizations and the full customer service continuum can increase awareness and employee responsiveness.  The result: siloed intelligence is shared, information is acted upon and customers benefit from an improved experience. 

About the Author
Jackie Hudson is one of the industry's leading workforce optimization professionals in retail banking.  Having overseen the implementation of many Verint retail banking customers in the US and Canada, she has led the design and implementation of some of the most sophisticated workforce optimization solutions in the industry.  Contact the author at jackie.hudson@verint.com.