The Back Office Can Pack a Powerful Punch!
1 Jul, 2007
By: Oscar AlbanOrganizations tend to underestimate the inter-departmental impact that back-office functions have on customer service and satisfaction. They often overlook the root cause of customer contacts. For example, when organizations identify the underlying motive for visits to a branch office or repeat calls into their contact centers, they may find processing delays and data-entry errors causing customers to call for status checks or billing mistakes creating frustration. Unnecessary repeat calls or visits due to inadequate back-office processes can not only impact the bottom line, but also signal declines in customer satisfaction.
Enterprises have long focused on the efficiency and performance of their customer-facing or frontline operations, including branches and contact centers. Fueled by intense competition, customer expectations and the need to contain escalating costs, workforce optimization and actionable intelligence strategies and solutions have played a critical role in helping maintain the delicate balance between service and cost, while opening the communications channels across departments.
Traditionally, contact centers have been viewed as the primary influencers of the customer experience – be it for the good or the bad. But they’re not alone. Modern back-office departments can pack a powerful punch and have a significant impact on customer service and satisfaction. When the two align and work in tandem, customer-centric organizations are born, customer service delivery chains become less complex and the customer experience is at the forefront.
Unifying Business Processes and Technology
The tie between the front office and back office is a close one, but often the dots within organizations simply do not become connected. While the majority of customer sales and service has been and, in many cases – based on industry, remains in the contact center’s domain, companies recognize that other outside, departmental influences not only impact the contact center, but also the customer experience. In this day and age, serving customers extends into any number of areas of the business – all of which can have a direct impact. Those focused on back-office functions – such as order fulfillment, claims processing, billing and data entry, for example – can play a significant role on customer service and satisfaction, not to mention the workloads of their contact center counterparts.
In the latest “Global Contact Center Benchmarking” report from Merchants, a Dimension Data company, respondents cited process optimization as the number one market trend affecting their contact centers. This means that the daily sales and service processes that employees and customers navigate can have both positive and negative implications on service quality.
Successful customer service, however, cannot be built on speculation – which is why today’s forward-thinking organizations have started taking a long, hard look at what’s worked well in their front-office contact centers to capitalize on and replicate those successes by applying them to their people, processes and technologies across other areas of the enterprise, including the back office. In many cases, workforce optimization and actionable intelligence solutions have provided not only a logical bridge, but a much-needed answer.
A variety of technology has been developed to track and measure service excellence. Forecasting workload and scheduling staff; recording and monitoring the speed, quality and consistency of service; analyzing productivity and engaging in e-learning have been standard practices in contact centers for years.
Consider interaction or desktop recording. Front-office contact centers can record all or a portion of select transactions/interactions through user-defined “business rules.” They can audit critical business functions to better understand the inter-departmental impact back-office functions have on customer service and satisfaction. By capturing the types of calls that drive their businesses or cause the greatest headaches, companies can conduct, identify and address the “root cause” that results in high call volumes and unhappy customers – such as problematic data-entry, compliance issues and ineffective processes. This is a big shift from the traditional thinking that has been around for years in contact centers.
It also can help them determine what’s causing customers to pick up the phone, become dissatisfied and stop buying their products or services altogether. Companies gain insight into what motivates customers to call, the types of calls frontline staff handle and other specific issues that result in the breakdown of service. They can find out not only why customers are calling, but how many others are contacting the company for the very same reason. These valuable results can then be fed into the back office and other parts of the enterprise, so process changes can be made, product/service issues can be quickly addressed and training needs among staff can be identified, prioritized and delivered.
Back-Office Alignment
In many ways, contact centers have never been more complex. Staff are charged with doing more with less, striking the balance between average handle time, first-call resolution, and even up-selling and cross-selling conversions. Operational costs must be weighed against high-quality service. Sales and service representatives must be well-versed at maneuvering their CRM and other systems, with some positions requiring proficiencies in phone, e-mail and chat skills. These workers need to be well-versed on their company’s product lines, services and policies. And they must keep their cool in the heat of working with frustrated customers. Their role becomes not only building customer relationships, but also maintaining them. It’s a very tall order, indeed!
That said, when back-office groups begin to implement the systems, processes and check points that the call center has successfully applied, great synergies can emerge.
For example: A pharmaceutical provider has been able to identify and leverage best practices by capturing desktop activities and evaluating recorded transactions both in its customer care and pharmacy contact centers. Using this type of technology, it has focused on enhancing quality through streamlined process optimization, regulatory compliance adherence and auditing of prescription dispensing to ensure fulfillment accuracy.
In another instance, a leading provider of broadband services estimated that it was able to save more than $2.8 million a year by capturing customer interactions and focusing on the root causes of bill-related calls into its contact center. By making the necessary adjustments to simplify its invoices generated in the back office, the company decreased inbound billing-related calls by five percent. What may seem like small jumps translate into significant savings and impact on the bottom line.
Easing the Front Office Load; Leveraging Knowledge Workers to Meet Needs
Now let’s consider this from one of several key workforce management and optimization perspectives.
A whole host of organizations today have invested in and relied upon their automated workforce management solutions to help them accurately forecast and schedule staff to meet customer needs and anticipated call volumes. It’s a productivity enabler – saving both time and money. And it results in proper staffing – including having the right employees to serve customers in the right place, at the right time.
In a recent customer survey conducted during our annual user conference, we polled attendees. One question was “do you align your best company resource to the customer situation, regardless of location and/or function?” One-third of respondents reported that this is something their organization already does today. Based on customer segmentation strategies, the trend is moving away from “next available” agent to “next compatible” agent.
Back-office workers – whose functional, every day responsibilities lie outside the contact center’s four walls – add another dimension to the staffing mix. Many are geographically dispersed and have technical skills, specific knowledge and/or expertise about the customer or the company’s products and services. Not only can they directly impact and offload customer queries during heavy volume/high traffic periods, but those who are “knowledge workers” can serve as domain experts to help callers with very specific needs. The end result is a win-win: the organization maximizes its resources, cuts wait times and off-loads specialized calls … and the customer gets the expert help he or she needs in the first go-round. Today, many forward-thinking companies are putting this model into action.
Conclusion
Providing high-caliber customer experiences remains one of the top priorities for organizations today and to have a truly successful strategy, the front-office contact center must be bridged to the back-office departments that either directly or indirectly impact the customer experience. Industry experts fully support this, predicting that enterprises that have prioritized investments in customer service and support optimization will grow their market share as much as 35 percent over the industry average. In more ways than one, the synergies across front- and back-office operations pack a powerful punch – one that speaks not just to customers but to a company’s own professionals.
