With today’s emphasis on customer interaction and experience, the back office is at risk of being overlooked.
Sure, your front line staff are the main touch point for customers engaging with your business, but you can’t expect these employees to operate at peak efficiency if your back office isn’t optimized. From forecasting workloads to running accounts, this is the team you’ll rely on when customers demand answers to more complex queries.
This article will demonstrate why back office performance analysis should be a top priority for managers.
Delays in back office processing can have a large impact on the contact center1. Find your weaknesses
If you want to improve the way that your back office staff are performing, you should start by identifying what isn’t working as well as it could.
Setting clear Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for your staff allows you to not only establish expected standards for work, but also to monitor trends. A good balanced scorecard provides you with the right performance metrics and allows you to identify and analyze individual points of weakness among your staff, and tailor ongoing training to meet these exact needs.
Your staff are a key resource when it comes to actioning the results of this analysis. As well as drawing your own conclusions, group back office retrospectives give employees a chance to provide feedback on what’s preventing them from reaching their goals, creating a cycle of improvement. A good performance program and action plan can not only dramatically improve your satisfaction results, but allow you to performance manage your employees ‘up’ and not ‘out’, resulting in a massive cost saving for any organization.
2. Improve customer experience
More than 50 percent of customers say that their experience of a brand will impact whether or not they invest in a service or product, according to Deloitte. Customer experience is, therefore, everyone’s priority – not just that of front-line staff.
Integral to this is making every effort to resolve queries or complaints the first time they’re raised. If this happens, you have the opportunity to turn a potentially negative experience into a positive one, says a study from PwC.
Customer experience is everyone’s priority, not just that of front-line staff.
To give your customer service staff the best chance of achieving first time resolution, it’s important to ensure that you provide them with as much information as possible – that includes providing visibility to business performance and potential problems such as backlogs or processing errors in the back office.
3. Your staff want you to
The increasingly visible millennial workforce crave the regular feedback that accompanies performance analysis, suggests a separate PwC report. Professional development is important to this demographic, so opportunities to discover areas where they can grow through training are welcomed.
If you’re a back office manager hoping to improve your processes and personnel operation, performance analysis is a vital step. Call Design’s Performance Management Essentials Course is specifically designed to increase your knowledge in this area, and implement successful change. For more information, get in touch with our team today.