Back Office Operations: Achieving Operational Excellence
Modern back offices have discovered how to do more with less. Learn what better looks like.
What is the back-office and why should I care?
The back office is the non-customer facing, operational areas of a company. These operational areas are typically organized into administrative functions, such as Finance and Accounting, HR, IT, and procurement, and customer support functions, such as account management, transaction/order processing, and industry specific functions such as insurance claims or loan operations.
The back-office has a direct impact on operational costs and customer experience. The more efficient your operations, the lower your costs will be. The faster and more accurately you process the requests of your customers, the higher their satisfaction and engagement.
We’ve written a guide that explains the difference between traditional and modern back offices, including the roles, industries, challenges and benefits of each.
How do I increase operational visibility and control?
Forming a clear picture of your entire back office operation can be challenging.
Walking around the office to visually collect data is no longer feasible with remote workers, social distancing, functional silos, disparate systems, and different processes.
You need a modern way of working so you can effectively manage the work and coach employees to maximize capacity and help them reach their full productivity potential.
Verint Operations Visualizer enables you to gain operational visibility and control. One component of the solution is Verint Application Visualizer, which captures employee application usage, identifying the applications employees use, when, and for how long. By categorizing applications as customer support or production related, and non-production related, you can quickly identify opportunities to redirect employee efforts so they are focused on the right activities.
Learn how a healthcare provider improved employee productivity by 16% with Application Visualizer, part of the Verint Desktop and Process Analytics solution.
How do I improve employee productivity and unleash hidden capacity?
Employee productivity is a sensitive subject. Leaders often lack real-time performance data and instead rely on subjective anecdotal discussions supported by a few metrics.
Tapping into your hidden capacity requires consistent tools, processes and real time visibility into performance trends and reports.
Verint Operations Visualizer includes role-specific scorecards, part of the Verint Performance Management™ solution so you can transform application analysis data into actionable performance metrics.
Employees can see how they are doing against key metrics, adjust their behaviors and attain their performance goals.
Learn how a digital financial services company improved employee productivity by 13%.
How can I speed turnaround times to meet my service level agreements (SLAs)?
Many back-offices lack a single, real time view into their work, even with a CRM or BPM system.
Are your managers leveraging Excel and email to try and bridge the gap between the work in the core systems, and all the work done manually or outside these systems?
This results in team members either doing only what is in front of them or are waiting for work to be given them. This approach obscures opportunities to maximize capacity and speed turnaround times.
Verint Work Manager enables you to manage workloads in real-time across teams, functions and systems. The solution automates collecting data from disparate systems for holistic visibility. The solution provides real-time, actionable dashboards that:
- Show all work volumes – new, backlog, completed and current work status
- Provide analytics to simplify management processes
- Track progress towards meeting SLA targets, ensuring exceptions don’t get lost
- Help identify bottlenecks and opportunities to streamline processes.
This insight enables managers to balance workloads across functions, ensuring employees are doing the right work, at the right time, in the most efficient way.
Learn how Capita how improved turnaround times by almost 90% and increased their NPS score by 40 points.
How do I maximize resource capacity?
It’s great to have visibility into your operations in real-time, but what about the future? Accurately planning for your resource needs can help you ensure you cost effectively meet your demand without negatively impacting service levels.
Verint Back-Office Forecasting helps you build sophisticated supply and demand models that simulate future demands on volumes, service level agreements and resource capacity at the process level.
You can create capacity plans at the team and department level, set hiring plans or reskill employees so you can shift employees to meet changes in demand.
By creating accurate process level capacity plans you can maximize resource utilization and execute work at the right cost.
Learn how the UK’s National Health Services Business Services Authority Pensions was able identify 29% in hidden capacity by simulating and modeling future volumes, adherence to SLAs, and resource capacity.
How do I build a culture of operational excellence?
In many ways, technology is the easy part. Gaining buy-in and changing people’s ways of working is often the greater challenge.
Managers have been working instinctively, relying on their experience and anecdotal evidence to make decisions.
What Operations Visualizer and Work Manager uncover is hidden capacity that managers never realize existed. To capitalize on that potential, managers need a new way of working.
With real-time performance data and Verint’s Principles of Operations Management methodology, you can create consistency in people, process and technology to drive the right productivity. This methodology helps you:
- Operationalization their technology investments
- Incorporate operational management best practices
- Establish a common language and the ability to set common goals
- Create a standard set of measures to ensure a consistent approach.
Learn how a UK energy company improved productivity by 30% and substantially reduced overtime leveraging the Principles of Operations Management.