Transforming the Invisible Back Office into a Competitive Differentiator
For a quarter of a century, contact centers have relied on workforce management software and business processes to bring visibility, transparency and consistency to managing work, capacity and people.
Today, sophisticated workforce management solutions not only help contact centers schedule and manage the right number of agents with the appropriate skills, but can also provide visibility into agent performance and productivity, along with cost savings.
But what about their counterpart: the back office?
Back offices play a critical role in customer service and satisfaction as they are the part of the organization that executes the product and service requests of your customers, such as fulfillment, claims, loan operations, client services, etc. And yet, these functional areas are typically looked at as an invisible cost center of the business—and often have little investment made to evolve their way of working.
Managers have had to “make do” with what they have. As a result, disjointed management approaches exist with disparate management tools, varying performance metrics, an inability to understand the full customer journey, and data that cannot be aggregated to support collaborative decision making.
The lack of consistent management tools and processes has created fiefdoms among the different functional areas, which inhibit strategic and tactical alignment to execute work cost-effectively and efficiently. Worse yet, the fiefdoms inhibit employees’ and managers’ ability to provide a seamless, end-to-end, service-oriented experience for the end customer.
Enterprise Workforce Management is a new breed of solutions that incorporates functionality to address the needs of the back office as well as the contact center—and, where present, branch operations.
The new ebook, “Enterprise Workforce Management: Command the Enterprise,” explains the differences between forecasting workload and scheduling resources in diverse functional areas, and how Enterprise Workforce Management can help bridge the gap to address the work, people and processes on a single, unified platform.
While sales and marketing get your customer in the door, it’s the performance of your customer support organization—both the contact center and back office teams—that keeps them happy and creates customers for life.
Therefore, improving efficiencies and resource management in the back office can help create a competitive advantage by helping to drive down operational costs while uniting your enterprise to exceed your customers’ expectations.
The post Transforming the Invisible Back Office into a Competitive Differentiator appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.
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