Three Challenges in the Back-Office and How to Solve Them

There’s no shortage of technology focused on front office work and employees. This makes sense – with multiple channels, sophisticated agent desktops, integrations – there’s a lot of ways to drop the ball when it comes to having a great customer connection on the front-end. But what happens when the call ends or a customer leaves the chat? The back-office brings a unique opportunity for organizations to deliver on customer expectations seamlessly or risk losing their trust and business altogether. Challenges in the back-office not only opens the door for potential customer churn and lost revenue, but also, inefficiencies in the back-office – which can be expensive. Goldman Sachs conducted a report in which they found that by automating the processing of paper payments, specifically manual invoices, they could generate roughly 60-70% in net savings. 

While there may be quite a few challenges in the back-office, there’s never been a better time to take a closer look at how those areas can be opportunities to reduce unnecessary costs, avoid potential customer churn and deliver on customer expectations more consistently. Check out the top challenges in the back-office and how you can overcome them with powerful technology solutions. 

Challenge #1: How Do We Plan? 

Back-office employees balance routine tasks while addressing urgent service requests, often with conflicting direction in terms of priority. Especially when there’s an unexpected increase in demand, back-office employees are left scrambling to complete the work. This creates opportunities for processing errors, leading to either additional work or frustrated customers. Plus, back-office employees can feel stressed or burnt out if this happens often which can increase the likelihood of attrition. 

Alvaria Workforce™ Back-Office Performance Module enables you to forecast specifically for back-office work. Plan for deadlines instead of service level agreements, model backlogs that carry into the future as long as needed, adjust to time periods that match your needs, etc. Plan for the staff required to complete back-office work in multiple ways and even model different types of work routing specific to the back-office. Create realistic scenarios and adjust in real-time, if needed. Gain insight on back-office work progress with intra-day visibility into task completion, backlog and staff availability. The Alvaria Workforce Back-Office Performance Module takes the guesswork out of back-office planning so you can accurately forecast and staff, accordingly, helping to reduce labor costs from under or over-staffing, reduce stress, and streamline back-office work. 

Challenge #2: What is the Process? 

Back-office employees manage a variety of tasks, including data entry, order processing and issue resolution. It’s common for multiple departments in the back-office to also be using different processes. This can make it difficult to ensure employees are utilizing the right tools in the most efficient way possible. Considering there are often multiple people involved in completing a task for a customer, if numerous people are inefficient this could mean a delay in getting the customer what they needed when promised.  

Alvaria Automate™ Attended along with key back-office metrics gives you a 360° operational view of back-office processes. Easily capture what employees are doing within and across their applications. Drill into which application, the duration, frequency, screens, forms, fields and selections. Improve how tasks are performed through automation and re-engineering. Create automated workflows based on the information gathered from process performance reporting. Ensure your back-office employees meet customer expectations on time with a detailed understanding of back-office processes. 

Challenge #3: How Can I Switch My Employees? 

Back-office employees and front-office agents can seem like they’re living in two different worlds. In some ways this is true. Back-office employees are most likely using different technology, they probably have a more typical 9-5 schedule compared to a contact center agent and usually their work doesn’t have the same SLAs associated with front-office work, such as an inbound customer call would. But it’s important to teach front-office employees how to do the work in the back-office, in some capacity. This way, if there’s a change in contact volume, it’s easy to move employees to where they can do the most productive work. 

With Alvaria, you can intelligently determine — and direct — each employee’s activity to maximize productivity, engagement and produce immediate results. When managing both front and back-office employees, leverage Alvaria to practice balancing channels. Depending on call volume, easily move front office employees to back-office work where and when appropriate. This means that employees are always working on delivering great customer connections, whether in the front or back-office. 

There are many opportunities to transform the back-office into a place for generating error-proof, cost-effective processes that meet customer expectations. To learn more about how Alvaria’s solutions can fuel your back-office efficiency, check out our latest datasheet here.