Taming the Wild West: Bringing the back office into your omnichannel contact center
August 16, 2023
In many organizations today, the back office is like the Wild West—operations are often uncharted, unstandardized, and unsupervised by a centralized authority. Back-office teams often have their own processes separate from their organizations, along with their own metrics and accountability standards, making it almost impossible to compare productivity across teams.Without consistent standards, back-office operations turn into a question mark. You can end up with long backlogs, repeat tickets, and duplicate contacts, costing team members valuable time when reaching out to customers with resolved issues.And there’s no clear winner when it comes to a strategy for the back office. A recent Contact Center Workforce Management survey found: Respondents were evenly split (50%) between using similar service level objectives across channels and different ones, and 54% of the respondents treated reopened tickets/cases as ongoing interactions, not new ones.But just as modern progress ended the Wild West more than 125 years ago, digital advancement is forcing organizations to rethink how they manage the back office. Organizations are coping with economic uncertainty and rising interest rates, and as a result, they are embracing the omnichannel contact center to realize a wide range of benefits. According to DMG Consulting, companies that combine back office and related contact center functions can reduce staffing in the back office by 25% to 40%, while speeding up processing, increasing first contact resolution (FCR), and reducing errors.It’s time to make the back office as manageable as the front office. Every contact center has different circumstances and needs, but by using data and analytics to accurately staff, measure, and improve operations across the front and back offices, organizations can increase back office productivity and proficiency. To make the two sectors work together, organizations must find a way to normalize two very different environments.