The Back Office: Surprisingly, Some Things Never Change

I recently analyzed 30 different proposals, RFPs, and discovery analyses of back-office customers and prospects over the last 15+ years. And one thing jumped out at me.

The challenges back-office operations cited in the 2000s are the same challenges organizations are struggling with today.

Here’s what I found.

Top 5 Back-office Challenges

1. Inability to measure associate productivity / need for performance reporting
2. Lack of long-term forecasting for capacity planning and budgeting
3. Need to reduce costs, FTE numbers, or increase capacity
4. Desire to improve control, processes and analytics capabilities
5. Need to increase visibility / understand who is doing what, when.

Why do these back-office challenges still exist?

With all the advances in robotic process automation (RPA), and next-generation versions of customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) and workflow solutions, you would think things would have changed.

So why are back offices still struggling with the same challenges?

The answer is as simple as it is complicated.

The advances in technology in back-office operations have focused on automating the processing of the work, whether it’s a product order, a loan application, or an insurance claim.

Yet, what these operational areas are missing are solutions that help increase the efficiency of their people.

By combining work item management with workforce engagement solutions, back offices can improve employee productivity, increase capacity, and speed processing times.

What do I mean by back office?

Before we go any further, I want to level-set on what I mean by back office.

Historically, back office has referred to all the non-customer facing parts of the organization that keep the company running, such as HR, Legal, AR/AP, facilities, procurement, as well as customer support functions such as order or transaction processing, claims, loan applications, etc.

For our purposes, we are focusing on the customer support functions, as these typically:

• Employ a large number of people doing similar work
• Handle processes that were started by and directly support the customer
• Can be complex, with many processes, systems, teams and requirements that make it difficult to manage and control.

To learn more, click here for our Definitive Guide to Back-Office Operations.

What’s the connection between back office and CX?

By optimizing your customer support functions, you can not only dramatically improve efficiency and reduce costs, but you can also directly impact the customer experience.

Increasing operational control and employee efficiency can reduce errors and repeat calls, speed turnaround times, and lower costs, which you can pass on to your customers.

Now let’s tackle the challenges. To me, the five challenges overlap a bit.  So, I’m going to consolidate them to three:

1. Increase visibility to understand, measure, and improve employee productivity
2. Build comprehensive capacity plans to maximize utilization and increase capacity
3. Create operational control with real-time insights and reporting so you can easily analyze performance and improve processes.

Increase Operational Visibility

Back-office customer support functions typically employ many people, working in different teams, on different systems. Today, many work from home or remotely.

Managers struggle to understand who is working on what, when, and if it’s the right activity based on what was scheduled.

A dependable, data-driven source to understand employee activity is the employee desktop. Verint Operations Visualizer captures application usage so you can:

• Identify when employees are working, in what applications, and for how long
• Categorize these applications into “customer/production-related” and non-production (meetings, coaching, lunches) and idle time.
• Compare application time to scheduled time to ensure adherence and validate shifts/hours worked.

Together, this information quickly highlights opportunities to improve employee focus on customer/production-related work, increasing productivity by 5% to 10% or more.

Check out how a digital financial services company improved employee productivity by 16%.

Understand and increase capacity – data needed

Not only are the teams diverse, but the work types and systems are very diverse. To create accurate capacity plans, you need:

• The volume of work you anticipate receiving, from all systems, including email inboxes, as well as manual, off-system work.
• Both new work volumes and backlog or carryover work from the previous day or week.
• Work status for current work (in queue, in process, pending, completed)
• The handle times for all work and process types (i.e., hours needed to complete)
• The service goals or turnaround times for each work type/process
• Employee availability – scheduled hours minus shrinkage
• Employee skills (who can handle which processes) and proficiency (new hires take longer to execute a task than tenured employees).

That’s a lot of data!  Typically, in the back office this data is housed in different systems, in manual spreadsheets, or are often best guesstimates. Hardly the formula for an accurate and comprehensive capacity plan.

Understand and increase capacity – data transformed

Verint Operations Manager can integrate with your systems, either directly or through APIs, and become a central repository for all this data. You now have a single dashboard with measurable metrics that translate:

• Work volumes and types into hours needed to be completed
• Employee availability and skills into hours available to execute work.

Managers can now easily see if they have enough resources to execute the work on time, enabling them to create more accurate demand forecasts, for both the short- and long-term resourcing.

They can quickly rebalance workloads intraday should there be an influx of work, absences, or a shift in priorities.

Read how a leading insurance company leveraged the real-time activity data in Operations Manager to balance workloads across teams intraday. Accurate, flexible capacity planning helped reduce overtime, increase resource utilization, and speed turnaround times by 23%.

“If we look at a group of people, we can immediately see the volume of work they can process. Likewise, if a backlog occurs, we can visualize the available capacity,” shared the insurer’s head of resource planning.

Check out the insurer’s success story.

Create Operational Control

The dynamic dashboards in Operations Manager give back-office managers the real-time insights, reporting, and control they crave so they can:

• Improve employee productivity
• Increase capacity
• Speed turnaround times
• Drive processing quality and consistency.

But don’t take my word for it.  Here’s what our customers have to say.

“We gained complete insight into process inefficiencies, true volumes, skills, capacity, and demand by the second. For the first time, the leadership team felt empowered.”

Operations Director, RSA

“Verint Operations Manager continues to play a vital role in delivering consistent workflow and performance controls. Used by more than 2,600 people across L&G, it provides the vital insights we need to optimize operational efficiency.”

Operational Planning Team Lead, Legal & General

“In my view, Verint Operations Manager is unrivalled in providing a foundation for service modernization. Its impact on operational performance is transformative.”

Life & Pensions Managing Director, Capita

“NHS Pensions is the largest pension service anywhere in Europe. With Verint Operations Manager, we are delivering the pension service experience every member deserves, while simultaneously transforming operational efficiency.”

Forecasting & Planning Manager, NHS Pensions

Isn’t it time for a change?

Contact us to speak to a back-office expert.  Click here to learn more about Verint’s back-office workforce engagement offerings.