BACK OFFICE FALLING BEHIND? BALANCE CUSTOMER CENTRICITY AND EFFICIENCY

Recently, Aberdeen Group and Verint recorded a webcast on the Next-Generation Back Office: Satisfy Customers & Drive Efficiency. 

Aberdeen research found that errors and delays in back-office processing where the number two cause of customer dissatisfaction.1 Omer Minkara, VP & Principal Analyst of Contact Center & Customer Experience Management at Aberdeen Group, shared the benefits of a next-generation back-office, what characterizes these organizations, and the building blocks needed to evolve your operations.  

“Customer experience is moving into the back office’s purview. Next-generation back offices balance customer centricity with operational efficiency,” states Minkara.

Traditional back-offices are falling behind on many fronts. The challenge is to build customer centricity while still balancing operational efficiencies.  Next-gen back-offices are doing this by:

• Integrating the voice of the customer (VOC) into the back office
• Automating tasks and management processes.

Integrating VOC

Aberdeen discovered two missed opportunities for organizations who don’t integrate their voice of the customer programs with their back-office activities.  When feedback is collected from customers on what new products or features they would like, but these requests are not shared with the back-end product developers, customers become frustrated with the process and organization. 

Secondly, opportunities to identify and rectify back-office process bottlenecks are lost when customer feedback is not shared with the back-office processing functions. Read the blog, “Oh No, I Lost My Credit Card,” to learn one customer’s success from sharing their Voice of the Customer program with their back-office organization.

Automating tasks and management processes

Automation fell into two categories:  automating management processes—such as forecasting and scheduling and real-time performance reporting with workforce optimization—and automating tasks and processes with Robotic Process Automation (view the video).

• Management processes. The example Minkara gave was the recent hurricanes. With real-time reporting on resources and availability, along with historical volume data, insurers could predict the spike in claims as a result of these events, and either modify service level commitments to customers, or reallocate resources to the back office to better handle the influx of claims. “If your back office is not using real-time reporting, you will lack the agility to meet rapidly evolving customer expectations.” @omerminkara, Omer Minkara, Aberdeen Group, Next-Generation Back Office: Satisfy Customers & Drive Efficiency 
• Robotic Process Automation (RPA). Automating repetitive tasks can help minimize human error and enable organizations to allocate back-office employee time to tasks where they can add more value to the organization.

Next-generation back-office organizations can not only benefit from improvements in operational efficiency—but improvements in financial outcomes and customer satisfaction as well. 

For example, Aberdeen Group research found that next-generation back office groups met their quality service-level agreements 21x more often than all others surveyed, had 3.7x greater year-over-year growth in annual company revenue, and enjoyed an 88 percent customer retention rate vs. 43 percent for all others surveyed.2 

To learn more, listen to the on-demand webinar.