As in many other industries, the financial sector is facing several challenges that have a distinct impact on back-office performance.
There is, for example, a knowledge gap that has arisen as a result of what we all know as “The Great Resignation.” New hires need to fill the shoes of experienced employees, which means investing significant time and resources in onboarding and training.
If the back office is going to justify those investments, then companies need to devote a lot of thought to how those employees (as well as the veteran employees, of course) can best be retained. Some of the effects of the “resignation” trend can be mitigated, for example, if employees want to stay on because they feel more engaged in their work.
Another approach some institutions have adopted is automating whatever tasks they can in the back office, freeing skilled employees for more value-added tasks. This has the advantage of helping keep those employees more engaged while also eliminating the need for new hires to take over routine tasks that can be accomplished by a bot.
Banks Need to Know What They Don’t Know
Whatever steps banking institutions decide to take, they are faced with the problem of lack of visibility into employee productivity and processes in the back office. With the recent economy-wide move to remote or hybrid work environments, that visibility has been reduced even more in many cases. Just as it has become harder to fully track back-office activity, it has become even more important. Financial institutions are finding it difficult to know who is doing the right thing in the back office, who is doing the thing right, and who should not be doing it at all.
An Aberdeen study of back-office performance noted that businesses cannot account for an average of two employee hours a day. That’s not even time spent at a long lunch. That is time simply lost. In a standard 1,000-person back office, that comes to about $1.5 million each year. A similar analysis by NICE, covering 40 customers in various industries, revealed that the gap between expected and actual productivity was, on average, 27%. This is equivalent to roughly 115 minutes of work time per day, per back-office employee.
Visibility, productivity and proficiency in the back office have a clear impact on customer satisfaction. According to the same Aberdeen study, 71% of back-office employee time is spent supporting service activities. For a back office of 5,000 employees, that is equal to around $177.5 million each year spent on tasks that ultimately contribute to a bank’s key differentiating factor - customer experience. Effective back-office employees are therefore a critical link in the chain leading to greater brand loyalty and less churn among bank customers.
Creating a Performance Culture
A financial institution setting out to improve its back office will need a new approach. They should reconsider moving beyond measuring success by production-based metrics (for example, a fixed number of applications processed). Instead, the goal should be creating a performance culture that includes looking at productivity indicators. An analysis of productivity, unlike a quantitative look at production alone, can reveal which employees are working most effectively, what exactly they are doing, and how. Their best practices can then be replicated across the workforce, driving overall performance, decreasing costs, increasing revenue and, taking a wider view, positively impacting customer satisfaction.
The NICE solution for bringing a more pervasive performance culture to the financial sector back office is the Performance Management Back Office Essentials (BOE) package. It includes the Performance Management software, desktop analytics, and preconfigured reports and automations. Its built-in integrations enable a consistent and centralized approach.
BOE will help you achieve the best possible outcomes for your back office. You can bank on it.
Read the full whitepaper on performance management in the banking industry back office here.
