In today's rapidly evolving business landscape, organizations can’t afford to overlook the pivotal impact of the back office on operational efficiency and customer experience (CX).
According to a recent survey conducted by Simpler Media Group (SMG), back-office organizations seem to have an equal number of contact center agents and back-office employees, and 22% of organizations dynamically share work between the two groups. Another study by Aberdeen Strategy & Research found that companies that bring front-office practices into the back office achieve a significant performance improvement across metrics such as back-office costs, customer retention, and employee productivity. [1]
Gone are the days when the back office was seen as an unmanaged workforce, with staffing something of a question mark. Still, the back-office environment poses several unique challenges for effective workforce management. That’s why a growing number of organizations are turning to advanced workforce management solutions to meet the dynamic demands of this environment.
From planning and forecasting to intraday tracking, scheduling, and productivity management, a best-of-breed solution like NICE WFM enables organizations to optimize the workforce in the back office in five crucial ways:
- Forecasting and capacity planning: NICE WFM enables the back office to forecast work volume more accurately with True to Interval technology by measuring work received and handled by each employee in each interval in which work activity occurs; by deconstructing cases, tickets, and conversations into data that enables a common planning interval across the front, digital, and back offices, NICE WFM creates historical patterns of interval-specific activity required to resolve long-duration synchronous or asynchronous contacts and work items. The solution also enables organizations to display and edit long-term forecasts, create forecast-based capacity plans, increase visibility based on backlog, and more.
- Staffing: NICE WFM helps leaders reduce staffing costs with efficient schedules. Flexible tools support any scheduling environment and consider the fact that much back-office work is deferred and can be handled in a number of days. WFM teams can predict over- and understaffing with Inventory Insights and manage blended work to ensure that service levels for both the contact center and the back office are met.
- Backlogs and overtime: NICE WFM enables back-office teams to manage backlogs and reduce overtime more effectively. They can use work volume and scheduled open capacity data to identify actual, projected, and expiring backlogs and leverage accurate current and forward-looking data to manage service level agreements easily.
- Employee productivity and empowerment: With NICE WFM, employees and managers have greater visibility into their actual productivity data, and employees have ownership of their schedule changes.
- Customer satisfaction: Accurate and comprehensive data and improved time allocation enable more targeted coaching and training, which increases efficiency and enables the back office to meet service levels. As a result, customer loyalty increases with NICE WFM.
Unlike traditional contact center-focused solutions, NICE WFM recognizes the diverse nature of back-office tasks, which often involve multi-step processes and deferred work items. By integrating CXone Desktop Discovery and intraday tracking, NICE provides actionable insights into changing work volumes and employee productivity, enabling organizations to forecast accurately and optimize resource allocations across the back office.
NICE WFM transforms back-office data into:
- Greater productivity and efficiency.
- Dramatic reductions in operational costs.
- Comprehensive and accurate forecasting and capacity planning.
- Real-time responsiveness to meet service level goals.
Read our NICE Workforce Management in the Back Office eBook to learn more about how NICE WFM is helping leading organizations, including a business process outsourcing company that increased back office employee production time by 30% per day, drive efficiency and productivity across all facets of back office operations.
[1] NICE: Crafting a Back Office of the Future (2024)
