The problems of the back office are evident across virtually every sector including manufacturing, utilities, telecoms, financial services, healthcare and public sector.  One of the issues is that ‘back office’ means different things to different people.  It can include many different functions from a single sales support person in a regional office to groups of people processing customer orders, claims or mortgages, financial transaction processing, even HR and payroll processing.  For eg it means the people behind the front line where transactions are processed that are critical to delivering the customer experience but are often unseen by customers.

It doesn’t matter how good the front office is, customer perception will be shaped by what comes after their initial transaction – all too often failures in the processes that follow.

So what exactly are the problems that need to be addressed?

Unlike call centres, where their one main input channel, the telephone, work can come in many shapes and forms via many channels.  As a result transactional processing is vastly more complicated and difficult to manage than the call centre will ever be.

The key to choosing a back office system for your organisation is to understand the problems that need to be addressed and to find a vendor with a track record of delivering the full range of functionality required out of the box.  Many of the solutions on the market have been derived from experience in the front office, manufacturing or financial management – be sure to choose a system that has been purpose built to solve the problems of back office – a tool that will achieve your objectives and deliver real business benefit.  This is not about Marketing hype but solving a genuine problem – how to optimise back office performance.

Are you looking to optimize your back office and what are the problems you face?   Share your thoughts and leave a response and I’ll respond to any specific issues.  I’ll also share with you the finding of some research we commissioned on this very topic.  In the meantime take a look at the Back Office Optimisation video.

In a recent article I read in ‘Call Centre’ it mentioned how the past two years have seen a huge 440 per cent increase in the number of complaints about the failures and shortcomings of UK banks.  The article then went on to say the majority of customer complaints were about workings and processes of the bank itself and complaints about staff had reduced.

So what are the contributing factors to these complaints?  Under investment in people, a failure in business processes, recession, the credit crunch, an unforgiving customer base?  It could be number of factors.  But how are you measuring these factors to make the necessary improvements?

The Institute of Customer Service recently blogged about First Direct and instilling a customer service DNA. First Direct are often the top of consumer satisfaction surveys so they must be getting something right.  They value training and development and this is evident through their employee behaviour.

In a blog from eg’s Tim Becker, he looked at the variation across a processing function and what this means in reality – elements such as productivity and quality will most certainly impact customer complaints. 

Consistent operational performance measures at a people level for skills; quality and productivity therefore should provide suitable benchmarks that can be used to quickly identify where help may be required.  This needs to go beyond simply capturing actual activity levels and more about the right behaviours and understanding that what gets measured gets better.

So whilst complaints about staff may have reduced, staff are the ones having to work within the bank processes and without the right measures and management information, a complaint is a complaint regardless of the reason.

After all, with the City regulator handing out penalties for those with inadequate complaints procedures; training, transparency, comprehensive management information and the right behaviours are the DNA that is required.

Further reading:

Handling Compliance

Client Case study – Improving Efficiency

Top Ten Customer Service Tips from call centre helper

Credit Today Conference

As an industry, it is widely acknowledged that debt purchasers and collectors are not always recognised as offering a great ‘customer experience’.  Whilst the dynamics of an organisation responsible for collecting debt cannot be championed as gracious, it is vital to engage with clients and customers in such a way to maximise the opportunity for equitable solutions.

At the recent Credit Today Collections and Debt Conference, the term “Can’t Pay/Won’t Pay” was used by several of the delegates when discussing attempts to develop customer profiles – separating debtors from those who can’t but want to repay from those who simply refuse.  This is a key area as it has a real affect on how an organisation will then attempt to recover debt, and if this segregation is incorrect it can lead to an ineffective and costly recovery process.

A speaker at the conference, Oliver Betts, Head of financial services & asset sale at TDX group, described his efforts at developing segregation and a deeper customer profile by adopting a strategy of “obsessive capture of data at every point in the process”.  The requirement for data collection covered all key areas such as customer profiling, outcome, and performance (KPI’s such as penetration, yield and roll rates) and provided the organisation with the analytics from which to shape itself for success.

The right approach to data collection, and using this management information to develop effective customer profiles, provides an organisation with the ability to match recovery processes to segments for greater efficiency – this will also improve the overall experience for the customer as they are targeted with the right methods for debt repayment.

Having a purposeful data repository is also an important factor when a lender considers selling or outsourcing a debt to a DCA (Debt Collections Agency), as without the customer profile the DCA could potentially undervalue the debt due to the work involved for them in subsequently building the customer profile from which to deploy their own collections strategies.

Collecting the right data at the right level requires intelligent operations management. eg has developed a range of products within its eg operational intelligence® software suite that captures and transforms the detail of every activity and interaction with a process or customer into a three-dimensional view of your operation.

In a collections area, data captured real time at agent activity level can provide managers with the ability to determine the true cost of debt recovery administration. A good example of this comes from within one of eg’s large retail banking clients who have sold part of their debt book to a DCA, but still administer the collections activity internally alongside their own books.  The use of eg operational intelligence® software in this client enables the segregation of each book, as well as the profiling of customers. A key benefit is the separation of administration costs, skills, and resources across both books and the accurate recoup of the administration costs from the DCA. The automated data captured can also used to determine the overall cost of debt recovery per account, a significant measure when determining which debts to sell or outsource.

Another eg client has applied data collection within their collections area to improve the performance of agents by measuring roll rates (early arrears through to late arrears), right party contact and outcomes. Individual performance is expected to increase by measuring at process level allowing the organisation to meet their overall recovery targets year on year.  To add balance within this operation, the client will also be collecting qualitative data to ensure improved performance does not come at the expense of expected customer experience standards – both measures will then be utilised for individual performance appraisals and bonus payments.

For more details on eg’s approach to achieving sustainable operational improvements within collections, arrears and debt management areas, contact me – adrianharvey@eguk.co.uk

In conjunction with the Professional Planning Forum there will be a FREE webinar taking place on 25 November.

This Back Office Online round table discussion will cover key operations management questions of the panel, around the three back office topics for the discussion:
·    How different is Operational Management to Real time management?
·    Can technology provide the support and multitude of data in the back office we see in the front office?
·    Can we begin to provide measures and metrics so we can plan and perform true end to end customer service?

You can ask the panelists questions and get their insight into Back Office Optimization.  Panelists include Innovation Award winners Adrian Hawes of Aviva and Grant Holden of HeroTSC, along with eg’s Tim Becker .

Register for the event today and join the debate.

I read with interest the recent blog from my colleague, Andrew Baker where he explored how important it is to get the people who are dealing with customer interactions and processing to take ownership for a balanced set of operational measures that reward the right behaviours.

This ownership should always be supported by a subsequent ability to capture consistent performance data about the processes and activities as well as the people who are performing them.

The most striking thing that I have learned after nearly 10 years in helping our customers improve overall operational management is that having access to consistent performance data is a basic need that provides the catalyst for first line managers and senior managers to implement consistent operations management best practice.

Without credible information about how well processes are performing, what activities need to be completed and how well our people are succeeding in terms of customer service, productivity, skills and quality; a manager is unable to take the right actions to improve performance and in particular the level of variance that exists.

However, simply providing access to the performance data is only the start and organisations need to put considerable emphasis on first line managers and senior manager to make sure that they are effectively trained in how to analyse and use the information to drive improvements in the level of variance in performance.

So why is it so important to drive improvements in the level of variance in performance?

Let’s consider some examples of the impact of variation across a processing function of 200 colleagues:

• 10% variance in productivity can reduce the amount of customer work completed within by the equivalent of 70 man days a week

• 5% error rate in our quality can mean that we have to have extra 10 colleagues just to re-do work that has already been completed once and this doesn’t even look at the delay to the customer

• The impact of lower skill levels across key process can mean that we need to spend 25% more time producing the same level of work

Therefore the role of first line operations managers in particular, is to analyse the variance that exists and take action.  A large proportion of variance typically exists within the people due to different skill levels; pace and motivation levels or by the fact that different people will follow different procedures to complete the same activities.

Consistent operational performance measures at a people level for skills; quality and productivity therefore should provide suitable benchmarks that can be used to quickly identify where help may be required.  This needs to go beyond simply capturing actual activity levels and has to ensure effective comparison to what Andrew referred to as ‘what good looks like’ in his blog posting.

In my personal experience, the consistency and credibility of this data and its availability on demand is the key to providing confidence to first line managers to take appropriate action and make significant improvement in people performance.

Our clients using the eg operational intelligence^® software suite certainly prove that to be the case.

Tim will be sharing his extensive experience in helping organisations set, implement and sustain effective performance management objectives at the Professional Planning Forum Conference on 19-20 April.

Written by Guest Blogger Colin Whelan, Senior Contact Centre Planning Specialist at the Professional Planning Forum.  

The Professional Planning Forum (www.planningforum.co.uk) is the independent industry body for effective resourcing and planning in the contact centre industry, working across all industry sectors to provide specialist support for contact centre professionals.  Championing the importance of these critical skills, the Planning Forum is widely recognised for its best practice research and case studies, as well as the results focused nature of its professional development training and in-company workshops.

Take a look at any call centre planning job on the market today and you’ll find a dizzying array of requirements.  Now, in increasing numbers of cases, employers are also looking beyond the call centre.  They’ve seen the gains to be made by bringing exceptional planners into their customer service environment and want to replicate their skills in the back office as well.

The problem, however, is that back office activity is inherently different to front office operations.  Instead of matching staffing levels to a call demand profile, back office planning is about creating a demand profile that suits the staffing levels already in situ.  It’s not aboutqueue management, it’s about workload management – and this, for many
planners, is a relatively untested area.

In fact, by following a four-step process, planners can not only get to grips with back office planning, but can actually start making as much of a difference there as they do in the call centre.  The fours steps are Process, Data, Planning and Performance Management.

• Process – Understand your processes and their complexity
• Data – You need to determine what level of detail you require from the data you’re capturing in order to ensure that each of those processes outlined in step one becomes as streamlined as possible and can be measured
• Planning – It is at this stage that a planner will be able to produce forecasts for workloads, start tracking targets and begin scheduling according to individual back office workers’ abilities
• Performance Management – Here, a planner will need to identify productivity, not only in terms of the individuals carrying out the work, but also the effectiveness of the processes those individuals are carrying out.

The reality is that defining processes and capturing data will only give you a snapshot of what’s happening in the
back office.  Equally, planning will only give you a tool to effectively resource the demands you’re anticipating. To
create a really streamlined back office environment, planners need to go one step further; they need to analyse all the
facets of steps one to three to identify what is being done well and, conversely, what aspects could be re-engineered and how.

Strategically focused planners are arguably the best people to support this process re-engineering work. But even the best planners in the country will not succeed if they don’t, right from the outset, have a firm grasp of what their success criteria are.

To continue the theme of customer service, and as eg are hosting a Software User Group today, I have decided to write a post on customer forums and their customer service benefits.

Every year eg run several operations management best practice forums, split between Focus Groups for Team Leaders & Managers and Software User Groups for Business Administrators.

The forums are developed to align event content with industry issues and client requirements and contain three core elements:

• Networking
• Operational Management Best Practice Development
• Product Development

Over the years we have found these forums have helped us to understand more closely the needs of our customers.  They also enable our customers to discuss and debate common issues, share best practice and suggest ideas for how we can develop our products and continue to help them reach their project or organisational goals.

Do you host or attend forums similar to eg’s?  Or perhaps you use online customer forums?  Who should own these forums: is it the client attending or the company that is hosting?

Whatever the case, I’d be interested to know what you think makes a good customer forum and the benefits you think forums like this can have on a customer service programme.  Please leave a comment or email me: catherinestaite@eguk.co.uk.

As this week is National Customer Service Week I thought it was appropriate to write my first post on a customer service-related subject. 

Having been at the Business Process Excellence in Financial Services Exchange at Canary Wharf recently, here is a summary of the main points and a discussion around one of the key themes: customer centricity.

The event was focused around improving business agility and performance whilst reducing cost and complexity.  Senior figures from across financial services gathered and shared views and experiences on how improving business processes will deliver this.

One question raised by eg was the metrics for process improvement – where did these derive from, was the management information trusted?  Did it identify prioritisation of improvement activities, monitor current and proposed process improvement and operationalise agreed improvements?  For almost all the answer was no.  

Customer centricity was certainly a key theme amongst the delegates.  One thing for sure is that people will need to make the quantum leap to do this.  Ensuring success will be no different to any other complex project.  Typical programme issues will be:

• getting executive sponsorship/stakeholder support
• making sure that you are addressing the right business problems
• training versus knowledge transfer.

In a sample survey of attendees at the event, 40% said they will actively take up a customer centricity programme following the conference.

Relatively few organisations have made significant progress in creating customer-focused organisations.  Whilst customer centricity is about thinking from the customer’s perspective, it is important not to forget the internal operational drivers that support this; such as end to end customer service management and aligning the resources of your firm to effectively respond to the ever-changing needs of the customer. 

Can you answer from a fact based perspective if you are actively managing work, people and processes consistently to deliver enhanced service to the customer?  I suspect many can’t or don’t have the real-time management information to do so.

I have a number of case studies of companies who are succeeding that I can share with you, so if you would like any of these then please email me at ask@eguk.co.uk

I have been training and coaching operational management disciplines in the UK for over 10 years and recently been working in South Africa too.   I think that regardless of the culture or operating environment the following tips for Team Leaders are the basic fundamentals in achieving operational excellence. 

Do you have any other daily tips you think should be added to this list?  Email me: wendyjeavons@eguk.co.uk

1. Keep your measures up to date!  Put in place a quarterly review process to validate all measures including service standards, staff skills and quality.

2. Maximise your available hours.  Produce stretching plans each day to meet individual and team targets.

3. Ensure all team members have a full days work based on their available hours and skill.  Apply the principles of short term scheduling to maintain motivation throughout the day.

4. Communicate daily objectives to the team.  Hold ‘Buzz Sessions’ each morning to energise and motivate everyone.

5. Involve the team in visualising performance throughout the day.  Update a whiteboard to show progress against plan.

6. Manage By Walking About!!  Don’t get stuck behind your PC.  Monitor work completion throughout the day by visiting each member of the team.

7. Actively feedback and coach on personal skills e.g. customer service in addition to technical areas.

8. Manage performance variance across the team.  Be prepared to challenge and don’t forget to recognise achievements throughout the day to maintain pace and productivity.

9. Analyse your results.  Understand the cause and effect relationship between all Key Performance Indicators.  For example the impact of skill levels on quality standards.

10. Undertake process reviews in consultation with your team members and other areas that impact the process.

More and more pressure mounts on organisations to improve customer service.  But what constitutes good service if we all have different standards and ideals?

Did you know that a typical business only hears from 4 percent of its dissatisfied customers? The other 96 percent quietly go away. Of this 96 percent, 68 percent never reveal their dissatisfaction because they perceive an attitude of indifference in the owner, manager or employee.

This statistic is particularly dangerous for businesses because if a dissatisfied customer can’t express their complaints to a business, they’ll express them through other outlets such as friends, neighbours and family. A typical dissatisfied customer will tell eight to ten people about their problem. One in five will tell 20.  It takes 12 positive service incidents to make up for one negative incident. Seven out of ten complaining customers will do business with you again if you resolve the complaint in their favour.  If you resolve it on the spot, 95 percent will do business with you again. (Source: Art Waller, Regional Department Head for Utah State University).

On this topic I thought you may be interested to know The Institute of Customer Service is once again running National Customer Service week which attracts enormous interest.  It is designed to raise awareness of customer service and the vital role it plays within an organisation. It is also an opportunity to say a big thank you to those who work in customer service for a job well done.

For how you can get involved visit http://nationalcustomerserviceweek.com/

Providing great customer service gets people noticed and makes it a pleasure to do business with the organisation. And we all know what usually happens when people don’t bother about their customers. That’s right – they lose them.

So ask your customers what they think constitutes good service, see how you are performing and then make the promise to deliver on this.  Let us know your results, feedback and comments on this please.