By Darryl Demos, Verint® Witness Actionable Solutions®
Customer experiences are shaped by many functions, departments and touch points across the customer service value chain. Store fronts, branch locations and contact centers play important roles. Another less customer-facing group that is equally critical to the customer service equation is the back office.
Many organizations underestimate the impact back-office operations and functions have—and how inefficiencies in any one department can ripple into others, resulting in call volume spikes into the customer-facing contact center, mounting customer frustration, and when extreme, churn. For instance, when companies identify the underlying motives for repeat visits or calls into their stores, branches and centers, they may find incorrect order fulfillment, processing delays and improper billing prompting customers to contact them. Unnecessary repeat calls or visits due to a lack of quality and process controls in the back office not only impacts the bottom line, but also can signal declines in customer satisfaction.
Today’s Back-Office Composite
It’s been said that for every one customer-facing service representative, there are up to 10 back-office workers in customer-affecting roles. As such, in many organizations, this area represents a great opportunity for improvements in operational efficiencies and productivity.
Fundamentally, back offices repetitively process large volumes of transactions involving both simple, routine tasks—and complex, multi-step, multi-touch processes. Personnel involved in the processing of work can include data entry clerks, auditors, account and case managers, and IT professionals. But regardless the function, the business objectives remain essentially the same—to process work as quickly and accurately as possible, at the lowest cost, meeting service delivery deadlines, and ensuring customer satisfaction.
Sound familiar? These are among the very same measures performed in today’s contact centers.
Enter Workforce Optimization in the Back Office
The contact center is one functional business group found in most organizations that is ahead of the curve in maximizing value, minimizing costs and keeping the customer experience at the forefront. For many years, it has created and refined operations processes and invested in software tools to become as efficient and effective as possible in meeting both business goals and customer care objectives. Prevalent is the use of workforce optimization (WFO) strategies and solutions—encompassing quality monitoring, workforce management, analytics, performance management and eLearning functions—which have helped lay the foundation for operations, efficiency and productivity gains, and higher caliber service delivered through better trained personnel.
Yet while back-office operations face similar challenges, they differ structurally. There are multiple departments that work from disparate systems, each leveraging different metrics to gauge success. Few can view enterprise operations holistically, and even fewer have the capability to effectively manage resources across the various functions. The back office also tends to have multiple organizational structures, each with many processing requirements. Instead of average handle time and time in queue, back-office groups have processing deadlines, quotas and service level agreements to meet.
Building a standardized framework for the many metrics and structures can be complex, as are the reporting requirements within and across operational areas. To transform the back office, organizations need to build on the solutions that manage and monitor the items being processed, and implement tools that help them just as effectively manage and monitor their personnel. And in order to create a true enterprise view that maximizes resources and services across operations, they need a complete understanding of the varied activities by organizational unit; a source of workload volumes for those activities; a progressive view on employee types and scheduling (full-time/part-time/peak-time/flex-time); and a process adherence capability.
Enter workforce optimization for the back office. Back-office WFO is essentially a strategy that includes a systematic, data-driven process for aligning work volumes to resources, monitoring the effectiveness and productivity of employees, measuring performance, identifying skill gaps and prioritizing training to remediate deficiencies.
Today’s most robust back-office-specific WFO solutions feature monitoring—in the form of volume/data capture, to gather information from multiple systems and generate activity volumes accounting for tasks performed. They include workforce management—by way of forecasting, scheduling, strategic planning and capacity modeling; analytics—in the form of application and process analysis. And they feature scorecard and training functionality. The applications are plentiful. For example, leveraging WFO intra-day monitoring of volumes, managers can adjust resources during the day to balance workloads, maximize utilization and ensure deadlines are met. The same holds true for longer term back-office functions, such as loan processing. Using performance dashboards capabilities, they can identify how well they’re performing against metrics at the individual, team, department or enterprise level—and from there take the necessary steps to align skills to tasks, coach/train personnel and modify processes.
Traditionally, front offices and contact centers have been viewed as the primary influencers of the customer experience. That said, today’s back-office operations departments are equally accountable in the roles they play. It’s where these points align and work in tandem that customer-centric organizations are born, customer service delivery chains become less complex, and customer experiences are taken to new heights.
Interested in learning more? Visit click on the upper right hand side and download “The Back-Office: the Next Competitive Battlefield.”
About the Author:
Darryl Demos is general manager of the Enterprise Solutions Group within Verint Witness Actionable Solutions. A principal architect behind the company’s innovative branch workforce management solution, Darryl is a frequent speaker on productivity topics at industry events, and partners closely with financial services firms and the back-office operations departments in companies around the world—focusing on cost efficiency, quality, and the productivity of sales, customer service, back-office and financial functions.