How Workforce Optimization Can Improve Back Office Efficiency

Written by KOVA Corp

Despite being part of the same business, the front office and back office rarely work very well together.

The customer-facing front office is concerned with customer satisfaction and quick issue resolution. The back office is concerned with longer-term tasks - things like remaining compliant, maintaining the budget, or evaluating legal issues.

Because the work of these two divisions is so different, it can often feel like they’re working at cross-purposes. Given these differences, it may seem counterintuitive that a workforce optimization (WFO) solution that has been successful in the front office could also work in the back office.

However, it turns out that the benefits of workforce optimization can absolutely be extended into the back office - especially when the back office solution is a part of the same system that works in the front office.

Here are some benefits of bringing workforce optimization into your back office.

Gain centralized management of staffing and workload

When a single WFO solution is in place, management is able to centralize staffing and workload distribution. Instead of toggling between two different systems, which makes it nearly impossible to see the big picture, managers can view the entire enterprise as a whole.

This makes a huge difference when trying to identify trends, locate trouble areas, and forecast workload.

Improve employee performance by “blending” your workforce

When a WFO suite is accessible in both the front and back office, it allows you to “blend” your workforce.

That’s not meant literally, of course - front- and back-office operations require different sets of skills, which is why your employees work where they do. However, that doesn’t mean that the front and back offices can’t improve their collaboration.

According to the whitepaper Bridging the Gap Between the Front and Back Office by Aspect, 60 percent of customer dissatisfaction is due to some sort of problem in the back office - even though customers never come in contact with those employees.

A WFO suite can be a great solution to this problem. By providing that centralized management, a WFO solution can help managers improve the way the front and back offices work together by improving communication throughout the contact center as a whole.

For example, managers can:

  • Gain a holistic view of their organization, allowing them to forecast work accurately and allocate staff accordingly.
  • Redirect front office workers to back office tasks when the workload is low.
  • Analyze productivity and skill sets.
  • Track customer interactions from initial contact to task completion and/or issue resolution.

Resolve issues more quickly and increase customer satisfaction.

In order to decrease those complaints that are related to back office problems, the front office and back office have to communicate more effectively.

After all, if the front office doesn’t know what limitations the back office is dealing with, front office workers can’t offer the best solutions to customers. And that goes in reverse, too: if the back office doesn’t know what complaints the front office is getting regularly, they can’t do anything to improve their processes.

A good WFO suite will give all employees access to real-time information, which is a vital part of reducing customer handle times and reaching resolution more quickly.

For example, let’s say a credit card customer called the company to check on the status of a credit line increase application. Typically, the front office worker would have to contact the back office to ask them to investigate the status of the application. This, naturally, results in at least one customer hold while the call-taker transfers the information to someone who can find out the answer.

With a WFO suite that extends to front and back office, however, the front office worker can simply check on the application status himself, accessing the same real-time updates that the back office workers do.

Workforce optimization suites aren’t just for the front office - they can work wonders for an organization as a whole. Learn more about how a workforce optimization solution like Verint Media Recorder can help your company here.

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