Workforce Management for Back Office

Submitted by Anonymous on Tue, 06/15/2010 - 07:47
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Efficiency and Productivity in the Back Office

Back office operations are often out of sight, but to corporate management, they are rarely out of mind. Most companies’ back office staff handles the communications and fulfillment activities that keep businesses running smoothly and efficiently. Ably managing this vital asset requires accurate forecasting and scheduling that balances workload with staffing resources as well as capturing and understanding employee desktop activity. The result? Better forecasting, process and employee performance optimization in the back office.
Historically, the contact center was the epicenter of the workforce management revolution, and for good reason. In the contact center, seconds count. Customer contacts come with high volume and frequency, and the issues they represent often require immediate resolution. So the need arose to develop techniques to monitor agent activities, refine predictions of contact patterns and resolution times, and optimize agents’ time to meet demand.
 
Meanwhile, the sophistication of back office management information and management information systems has lagged. Compared to the copious amount of data collected and processed about contact center operations, the back office is virtually a black hole. Allowing this to continue can be a costly mistake.
 
By combining NICE IEX Workforce Management software and desktop application monitoring systems from NICE, back office managers can obtain an accurate view of the time employees take to complete tasks, measuring it across many of the same dimensions as an agent would be monitored in the contact center.
Bringing classic workforce management tools, such as call center forecasting and scheduling and agent adherence, to the back office can have quantitative and qualitative benefits. Supervisors are freed from unreliable, intrusive time and motion studies. Objective, data-based agent performance reviews become possible and bias disappears from the evaluation and promotion system. Key performance indicators and scorecards can be built for individual agents as well as groups and teams.
 
The risk of overstating the need for overtime becomes a thing of the past. Managers can identify when agents are performing tasks inefficiently and take corrective action.
 
Adapting the concepts of call center workforce management to the back office is possible, practical and a cutting-edge way to improve effectiveness and efficiency.
NICE approaches back office workforce management by observing agent activity in software applications and mapping that activity to discrete jobs, cases and tasks. Key-presses and button-clicks can trigger timestamps when agents start and stop activities, put activities on hold, or go idle. With second-by-second monitoring, the system unobtrusively builds a true picture of handle time.
 
NICE offers a variety of tools to collect and report information from nearly any agent desktop application and view the data in a meaningful way including:
 
  • Forecasting and scheduling– Classic workforce management functionality that analyzes workload and schedules employees accordingly.

 

  • Performance management– Delivers a clear view of goals and results.

 

  • Trigger– Tracks work activities each employee completes and the associated handling time; alerts supervisors to key events such as security and compliance violations.

 

  • Monitor– Tracks desktop application usage and provides historical and real-time schedule adherence data to the workforce management system.

 

  • Process– Provides visibility into how business processes are actually performing and, from this data, identifies best-practices and guides all employees to them; tracks key metrics for each process.