A holistic view of back-office operations

September 11, 2018 | Business Improvement, Operational Excellence, Workforce Management

A holistic view of back office operations
Back-office operations is key to every organization

What are the insights from back-office operations? Back-office departments are often the unsung heroes of the business and rarely get the deserved credit for the role they play in businesses overall success. They are ultimately responsible for the smooth operations of the front office staff carrying out the service requests of the customers regardless of the channel they arrive on and deliver on customer service reps promises, but this often gets overlooked.  The client-facing roles of the front office departments are because of the ACD and MIS technologies easy to measure and schedule and hence are being recognised for their individual or teams’ performances as the metrics are easy to gather and well know across multiple industries or sites and competitors.

Whilst the recognition of achievement should be equally important for both front and back office, the back-office leaders find it challenging to track the performance of their teams in a similar manner.

Back-office management

Scheduling work, forecasting, assigning tasks and responsibilities, measuring performance and productivity as well as empowering team leaders and administrative employees are just some of the tasks of the back-office manager. You cannot easily assess those metrics individually but rather analyse the impact they have at one another, to see the holistic view of operations. Additionally, more complexity appears when taking to account metrics such as seasonality, proficiency, service level agreements and workload – allowing a more integrated approach and should contribute to a more productive, thriving back-office.

Back-office challenges

Management of front and back-office operations vary in terms of challenges and deliverables. Usually, companies invest heavily in their front office and hence have clearly defined goals and objectives. The management of the back office is more complex due to it being multifaceted. Having multiple touchpoints and interactions with various software, stakeholders and technologies, makes it really hard to measure the performance of teams and individuals, the time they spent on tasks as well as assessing whether they are being productive whilst completing the job.

At the same time, without having a full, holistic view of agent’s performance, their adherence to schedule and handling time, it’s hard to introduce effective initiatives, identify areas of improvement, bottlenecks, failure demand or where the additional training is needed.

The lack of data on the demand and capacity to fulfil the demand creates a stumbling block on the effective back-office management and efforts to optimise its work.

Back-office operational insight

OPX provides a holistic view into operations that is key to providing an optimized back office. Having greater visibility into the demand being placed on the back-office in real time from all existing and new digital channels in a  similar way to how call centre agents handle demand and capacity in the call centre together with tracking how agents spend their time will highlight areas that need extra motivation and management time. With insight come many other benefits including reduction in overall administrative time, better resource management, utilization and improvement of the agents’ productivity as well as identifying training needs and increased job satisfaction.

You can’t manage what you can’t see.

OPX operational insight provides the data and the dashboards to allow you to focus on underperforming areas, cost justify system and operational procedure changes, enhance the target operating models, as OPX is an open system easy to integrate with back-office operations data captured by OPX can be easily fed into third-party business information systems, data warehouses and custom in-house spreadsheets applications for aggregation, reporting and presentation with other information sources, allowing even greater visibility and integrated view.

Operations managers or team leaders, dependent on permissions, are able to configure the operations’ hierarchy, locations, team structures (including robots), team members, shift patterns, skill profiles and business processes together with appropriate service level agreements (SLAs). Data gathered across all these data dimensions provides a very detailed, holistic view of your back-office operations, and combined with projections of demand and capacity allow for both real-time reports and detailed forecast models, team members (including robots) can be dynamically re-assigned to meet changes in real time work volumes or complexity based on granular skill capacity and availability, improving teams’ productivity, utilization and efficiency while ensuring no unexpected impacts on quality.

No matter what sector or industry you work in, if you want a strong, productive back-office team to support it, you need OPX Operational Insight. Please contact us to arrange OPX demo.

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