Boost your back-office productivity by 30 percent

As the backbone of an organization, the back office is a frequent target when C-level leaders are looking to cut costs. Yet the savings are often fleeting, a study by McKinsey found – just four in ten companies meet their targets one year into a cost-cutting program, and 90 percent of back-office costs are back where they started four years later. The study's authors argue that the lack of success is often because organizations fail to measure back-office performance in a sufficiently detailed way, which results in missed opportunities for improvement.

Organizations often implement solutions to leverage performance management and analytics in the front-office but overlook workforce optimization solutions for the back office. Because of this, companies frequently struggle to maximize productivity and engage their back-office employees. This can lead to service quality issues that harm relationships with customers.

The good news is that there are simple ways to increase the productivity of your back office – in fact, there are 30 of them. Among the ways your organization can increase back-office productivity by 30 percent:

• Fix broken processes: If you haven't already looked through your current workflows and documented broken processes, now is the time to do so. Fix broken processes prior to deploying a solution that pairs performance management and desktop analytics. This will help lessen the maintenance needed for the data feeds in the future and enable your workforce optimization solution to deliver a more accurate view of your back-office performance.
• Measure the pros and cons of manual item tracking: In back-office organizations, it can be difficult to capture and measure the number of items worked and completed by an employee along with actual handle times that work. Some back-office groups use manual methods, such as Excel or pencil and paper, while other groups have application tools that require employee input. Create a list of pros and cons to determine whether the manual work required outweighs the positive of receiving data, including: number of work items completed per day, handle times per work item, stop reason associated with each item, ability to see total cycle time for a unique work items, application usage within the work item, number of touches per complete, and the percent completed with first-tough resolution.
• Replicate best practices: Back-office data and production metrics will help you identify the star performers who are able to do more work in a short period of time. Leverage and replicate those best practices to see an increase in efficiency across the team.
• Focus on the benefits to the employee: A back-office solution enables visibility into application usage as well as idle time, and this can initially feel threatening to employees. Leaders and supervisors should frame this visibility positively while explaining the data that will be collected, how it will be used in metrics, and how coaching will benefit the employee. 

Productivity is just as important in the back office as it is in the front office. Read our ebook for the full list of 30 ways to make your organization's back office more efficient and effective, or visit our website for more information on NICE's back office solutions.