Steps to Peak Performance in the Back Office eBook

5

5 Steps to Peak Performance in the Back Office 2

What Happens Beyond the Contact Center?

Systems

Customer Relationship Management

Financial Accounting Systems

Human Resources Management

Operations Management

Project Management

Custom or Legacy Systems

Are your right people working on the right tasks at the right time?

Probably not – and it’s not the fault of your employees. The back office environment in which they work simply isn’t set up for streamlined operations.

Within the contact center, you know exactly what everyone’s doing. You have the insight and tools to help people be productive and effective. But once work goes beyond the contact center to your employees who fulfill the customer needs, it disappears into a maze of complexity.

• Knowledge workers have to figure out what to work on, when and how.

• Managers have to guess at what skills and schedules are needed, as well as manually assigning work many times per day.

• Important customer work easily falls into the gaps.

• The back office is a maze of disconnected systems, workloads and people.

Workloads

Varied workloads

Unpredictable volumes

No visibility across all workload

People

Varied skills

Different locations/offices

Different levels of training/performance

Varying schedules

5 Steps to Peak Performance in the Back Office 3

Hidden Opportunity in the Back Office

-- McKinsey & Company, “Customer Journey Transformation:

The Idea, The Impact and How To Start,” September 2013

Journey-led transformations deliver impact across multiple dimensions

Improve Customer Satisfaction

20%

Fuel Revenue GrowthChurn, upsell, acquisition

10to

15%

Lower Cost to Serve

15to

20%

Engage Employees

20to

30%

20% in customer satisfaction 10-15% increase in revenue growth 15-20% decrease in cost to serve20-30% increase in employee

engagement

Where others see complexity, smart businesses see opportunity.

Businesses that streamline customer-focused work through the back office are able to improve productivity and employee engagement while cutting costs. Because fewer tasks fall through the cracks, they also improve customer satisfaction and retention.

According to McKinsey & Company, companies that transform customer service to support the customer journey realize...

5 Steps to Peak Performance in the Back Office 4

5 Steps to Reaching the Next Level of Performance

Establish Employee Presence

Create a Global Task List

Prioritize Tasks

Assign Tasks Automatically

Forecast and Schedule

Where others see complexity, smart businesses see opportunity.

Enterprise workload management and enterprise workforce management technologies help you connect the diverse people, applications and workloads to meet your business objectives – all in real time.

While business transformation may sound like a tall order, it can be broken into five relatively simple steps.

If you achieve only the first step, you’ll be on your way to greater back office efficiency. Accomplish all five, and you’ll have transformed your business for the better.

1

2

3

4

5

5 Steps to Peak Performance in the Back Office 5

Establish Employee Presence

The workforce is where work actually happens. Without insight into employee availability or current status, you cannot begin to improve business process throughput or optimize performance.

In the contact center, where customer requests begin, you know exactly when people are online and available. In the back office, employees on the critical path for workloads should have the same visibility. This way you won’t send a time-critical task to someone in all-day training session or at a conference.

With detailed employee performance data and insight into business process throughput, you have a better idea of workforce availability for scheduling and forecasting, and what kinds of workload you can manage with different staffing levels.

1

5 Steps to Peak Performance in the Back Office 6

Create a Global Task List

Integrating all the different systems that run your business may be impossible. But you can get an integrated view into the work tasks by feeding work from those systems into a single, global task list.

When you consolidate tasks from all of the different systems, you get a better sense of the overall workload for scheduling and forecasting. Instead of facing separate, disparate silos of tasks, you gain visibility into the complete workload. With this insight, you can adjust schedules, training or work inventory.

Without a global task list - work silos With a global task list – comprehensive visibility

Front Office Management Back Office Field/Dispatch

Voice

Project Management

Human Resource Management

Customer Relationship Management

Corporate Systems

Financial Accounting System

Operations Management

HumanResource

Management

CustomerRelationshipManagement

CorporateSystems

FinancialAccounting

System

OperationsManagement

Client Service Channels

Global Task List

2

5 Steps to Peak Performance in the Back Office 7

Prioritize Work by Business Rules

Is the right work getting done first? Not all tasks are equally important to your business.

Now that you have a global task list, you can prioritize it. To do this at scale, you need to define business rules and use them to prioritize work.

• What’s the overall revenue impact of this task?

• What is the service level for this customer/account?

• How long has this task been in the queue? Are you at risk of missing a service level guarantee?

Business priorities change, so you want the solution to be flexible and easy to change.

(Business managers should be able to easily manage task priorities without having to wait for help from a script-writing wizard from IT.)

3

5 Steps to Peak Performance in the Back Office 8

Assign Work to the Right People

Once you’ve prioritized tasks, you need to get them to the right people. Don’t wait for people to choose – assign tasks automatically based on skills and availability. This way the most important work will get done first.

You can set up rotating teams to handle specific types of customer tasks, so no one’s stuck doing the same thing every day. Find creative ways to keep employees engaged and productive.

Here’s a sample strategy using rotating, task-specific teams and a “swing” team to manage the gaps

Dedicated Team

• Work on one task type each day

• Rotate task types throughout the week

Swing Team

• Multi-skilled

• Acts as “capacity buffer”

Proactive Routing

Workforce Planning

BusinessRules

AddressChanges

ClaimApproval

BillingResolution

ComplaintHandling

PerformanceManagement

Swing Team

4

5 Steps to Peak Performance in the Back Office 9

Forecast and Schedule for Optimal Efficiency

With visibility into workload, employee status and task assignment, you can optimize performance through better scheduling.

• Predict workloads using insight into the total volume and distribution of tasks.

• Track actual handling time for tasks so you can schedule your workforce based on accurate forecasts.

• Have the right skills available for predicted work, reducing backlogs and overtime.

• Help supervisors manage employees more effectively by providing insight into individual performance and needed skills.

89%

of Customer Service decision makers can correlate good agent experience to better customer ratings between 50 and 80%

of the time.

-- Forrester Consulting on behalf of salesforce.com, July 2012

5

5 Steps to Peak Performance in the Back Office 10

How Much Efficiency Can You Gain?Just how much improvement can you gain from an enterprise workload management solution in your back office? More than you may realize.

Typical results from an enterprise workload management implementation include:

Efficiency:

• 17-24% increase in workforce utilization

• Peak capacity performance without additional cost

• Reduced supervisor-to-employee ratio through better visibility and forecasting

Copyright ©2014 Genesys. 2001 Junipero Serra Blvd., Daly City, CA 94014All Rights reserved. Genesys and the Genesys logo are registered trademarks of Genesys. All other company names and logos may be registered trademarks or trademarks of their respective companies.

www.genesys.com

About GenesysGenesys is the market leader in multi-channel customer experience (CX) and contact center solutions in the cloud and on-premises. We help brands of all sizes make great CX great business. The Genesys Customer Experience Platform powers optimal customer journeys consistently across all touchpoints, channels and interactions to turn customers into brand advocates. Genesys is trusted by over 4,500 customers in 80 countries to orchestrate more than 100 million digital and voice interactions each day.