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Viewpoint: Evaluating the effectiveness of the back office

By Ebrahim Dinat
Johannesburg, 02 Sept 2015
The quality of service the front desk provides a customer is related to the 'horsepower' of the back office, says Ebrahim Dinat, COO at Ocular Technologies.
The quality of service the front desk provides a customer is related to the 'horsepower' of the back office, says Ebrahim Dinat, COO at Ocular Technologies.

The back offices of service organisations in particular are the engines that drive the customer facing front desks.

Consequently, the strength, swiftness and quality of service that the front desk provides a customer is unswervingly related to the "horsepower" of the back office.

It is therefore essential to strengthen the effectiveness of the back office as well as acknowledge it as the hub of customer engagement to realise value at the front desk.

According to Ocular Technologies' partner company, Aspect, the actual level of optimisation being applied in the back office varies greatly by organisation.

In order to introduce a standard for describing the current level of automation, Aspect has developed a set of eight key benchmarks that collectively define the current degree of back office automation. They are as follows:

* Benchmark 1: Can monitor progress of work items throughout the back office process.
* Benchmark 2: Can see backlog of work at every step in the process.
* Benchmark 3: Can receive alerts when the operation is about to miss SLAs.
* Benchmark 4: Can easily reallocate work and re-deploy people in real-time to meet SLAs.
* Benchmark 5: Can accurately forecast need for back office staff.
* Benchmark 6: Can automatically schedule back office staff for specific tasks based on skill.
* Benchmark 7: Can see adherence of back office staff to scheduled tasks in real-time.
*Benchmark 8: Can track employee and team performance in real-time.

As Rob Moore, senior manager for product marketing at Aspect, says "If an organisations says 'yes, they can do that' to all of these benchmarks, they indeed have a remarkably automated and optimised back office."

Most companies meet none or only a few of these benchmarks. They are missing the 20% to 40% in cost savings they could be enjoying and settling for a significantly lower quality work product."

Vital business is performed in the back office and it's definitely time to give it a boost. View it as a critical company asset and nurture it with as important optimisation tools as you do its more "glamorous" front desk counterpart.

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