Are Distracted Back-Office Employees Causing Your CX to Crash?
The back office is often the moment of truth in a customer’s journey—where the promises made to customers are actually fulfilled.
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Studies show that texting while driving makes us 37%1 to 50%2 less aware of our surroundings. Twenty-five percent of car crashes involved texting while driving. In fact, the odds of crashing are 8x higher when texting.3
Distraction in back-office processing is also having a negative impact—except the crash here is a missed mortgage rate, a declined debit card, or a delayed disability claim.
Performance in the Back Office Is Critical for End-to-End CX
The back office is often the moment of truth in a customer’s journey—because this is where the promises made to customers are actually fulfilled.
It is an essential part of elevating end-to-end customer experience (CX) within customer service operations. When the back office falls short, the entire customer journey breaks.
Errors and delays in back-office processing ripple forward, creating unnecessary customer frustration and additional workload for the contact center. In fact, Aberdeen research shows that 16% of contact center inquiries stem from mistakes or delays in back-office work.4
Bottomline: A breakdown in CX within your customer service operations can cause customer churn, lowering your revenue. It also creates unnecessary operational effort to fix issues, raising your costs to serve. The financial impact is significant—often reaching hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars annually.
The Hidden Risk of Back-Office Employee Distraction
Employee behavior in the back office directly impacts CX and operating costs. If desktop activity reveals frequent task switching or a lack of focus, it signals an increased risk of errors, missed deadlines, and ultimately poor customer outcomes.
When work isn’t done right the first time, customers pay the price.
The Real-Life Impact of Distracted Back-Office Employees
Mistakes and delays don’t just inconvenience customers; they can disrupt lives:
- My partner is critically ill, and I need his disability claim paid to care for our kids.
- I’m going to miss out on a lower mortgage rate because they made a mistake.
- My debit card was declined, and I was embarrassed standing in the checkout line.
- The hospital keeps calling me because my insurer is late paying.
These are not hypothetical scenarios—they’re real consequences of back-office inefficiency which can damage your CX and erode brand trust.
How Desktop Analytics Can Minimize Distracted Processing
Desktop analytics tools provide visibility into how employees spend time on their desktops. By analyzing patterns of focus and productivity, managers can identify when employees are:
- Distracted by multi-tasking or interruptions
- Spending too much time on non-production related activities, such as meetings and breaks
- Leveraging inappropriate or unnecessary applications that provide inaccurate information, leading to work errors and a higher level of effort to get the work done.
With this insight, managers can coach back-office employees and redirect them to the work at hand. Organizations benefit from:
- Improved quality: Steady focus on processing the work at hand reduces errors and rework.
- Recovered capacity: Reduce non-productive time and redirect effort to process the work.
- Fewer errors and delays: Reduce the 16% of contact center calls caused by back-office mistakes.
- Improved operational costs: Avoid overtime and backlog clearance by increasing the focus and capacity of existing resources.
The impact is significant. Organizations often find at least 15% recoverable capacity in back-office operations. Here’s what that looks like in numbers:
- Back office: 15% capacity reclaimed across a 1,000 FTE team (average salary $55,000) = 282,000 hours valued at $7.46M annually.
- Contact center: 10% increase in capacity across a 700-person team (due to fewer calls regarding back-office issues) = 131,000 hours valued at $3.48M annually.
- Combined impact: 413,000 hours liberated, worth $10.9M—equivalent to adding 200 new headcount to do the work.
The Bottom Line
Desktop analytics isn’t just a productivity tool—it’s a CX enabler and a cost optimizer.
By uncovering lost capacity and improving focus, organizations can deliver work that’s accurate and on time, preventing customer frustration, and saving millions in operational costs.
Ready to See It in Action?
Discover how leading organizations are transforming back-office operations and improving customer experience with Verint Desktop and Process Analytics.
1 Cell Phone Use and Texting While Driving Facts and Statistics, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia Children’s Hospital Research Institute
2 Distracted Driving and Your Brain, Safety Driven, Trucking Safety Council of BC
3 The Science Behind Distracted Drive, American Safety Council Blog
4 Time for a Fresh Take on Back Office: Road to Efficiency and CX Excellence, Aberdeen Group, 2024