The topic for the event is “Driving Customer Excellence through Back Office improvements using analytics for insight and appropriate metrics (KPIs) to install the right behaviours for the customer and the business to achieve best practice.”

Sign up and book your free place today.

The aim of the webinar is to discuss the characteristics of true customer excellence, as there are often a number of questions we need to answer:

• Do we really understand what the customer is in contact with us for?
• Are all our people aligned to deliver this?
• Are we in a position to measure if we are delivering against this goal?
• Is this goal actually aligned to our operational strategy?

To contribute further information to the topics up for discussion email us or leave your comments below.

The session will be chaired by the Professional Planning Forum’s Back Office specialist Colin Whelan, with a panel of industry experts including Elizabeth Gooch, CEO at eg solutions plc and Tim Becker, Head of Client Engagement and others to be announced in the coming weeks.

As part of the webinar you are encouraged to get actively involved in questioning the panel on topics raised throughout. View a case study on the eg principles behind Back Office Optimization and Operations Management best practice and prepare some questions in advance.

For more details view the news story or email ask@eguk.co.uk

Following a recent eg executive dinner delegates were asked to complete a short questionnaire which highlighted the main focus to be around reducing operational and IT costs without compromising a high level of customer service.

At eg we advocate a balanced set of measures to drive overall performance improvement, spanning the key performance areas of;

Service Levels achieved, Quality scores, Skill based Capability levels achieved, Throughput levels of work, Productivity based performance indicators.

With the numerous KPI’s available within the eg operational intelligence® software suite supporting these key performance areas, we are often asked which are the most important ones to focus on to drive improvements in your current Workforce Optimisation levels?

As a business which specific eg KPI’s are you focussing on in 2012?

Do you combine or link KPI’s from one key performance area to another, for example your Service % and your Efficiency %?

What KPI’s do you use in addition to those available within the eg software suite?

Let us know by sharing your thoughts on this post.  We look forward to sharing the feedback we gain and our thoughts on this topic on the 13^th March at Anfield for the first of eg’s Focus Group for 2012.

This topic was raised within a recent site survey, where a potential client was always satisfied with the weekly team performance reports as they came back showing ‘lots of green’, meaning agreed target thresholds had been met.

However, when eg further analysed the ‘Team Performance KPI’ figure of 101%, we discovered that there was a big variance in actual individual performance of between 50% – 150%. So, below standard individual performance was being ‘hidden’ within the accumulated team performance effort and opportunities to manage and identify this underperformance was unknown.

Once the findings were presented back, the Team Manager was very quickly able to manage the underperformance leading to a reduction in the performance variance and reaped the benefits of increased outputs. If we always accept the combined effort results rather than take the opportunities to really analyse our data, then these types of opportunities to improve would be lost.

Have you had any similar experiences within your organisation, where tapping into the underlying data has identified opportunities to make tangible improvements? If so, it would be great to share these with our client base by adding your comments below…

Or, if you would like to know how eg’s back office optimisation product suite can help you discover where significant improvement opportunities are hiding in your organisation, then email or telephone us on +44(0)1785 715772.

The solution……Adapt the right leadership style for the right people – Understand the diversity of individuals in the team and monopolise on their strengths and weaknesses to drive results.

This is easier said than done when dealing with humans that are driven by emotion.

So how do you motivate your team to achieve results?  Coaching is widely used and can be effective when done well but often coaches are not selected based on the right skills or training.

In one of our previous blogs Paul Cooper from The West Brom asked how others managed to make customer facing  staff who are, on the whole, at the lower end of the salary scale come back day after day?

People are our most important asset and in order to motivate you need to plan and forecast accurately, communicate the plans and expectations, set realistic and achievable targets coupled with the effective coaching, challenging and cheer leading that is needed to drive results and motivate individuals to succeed – not easy to do own your own but help is at hand.  eg have a proven methodology for success that is endorsed by the ILM and provides a recognised qualification.  If you’d like a copy of this just email me or with any specific questions.

Here’s some food for thought in the meantime “emotions move people!”

“Hersey-Blanchard Situational Leadership Theory states that instead of using one style successful leaders should change their leadership styles based on the maturity of the people they’re leading and the details of the task. Using this theory, leaders should be able to place more or less emphasis on the task, and more or less emphasis on the relationships with the people they’re leading, depending on what’s needed to get the job done successfully.” Source: http://www.mindtools.com

As part of eg’s client events in 2011, Executives and Managers of back office operations across Financial Services organisations were asked to indicate what their key business priorities and strategic objectives would be in 2011/12?

Overwhelmingly, respondents, regardless of level chose the same three priorities (full list avaliable):

• Customer service improvements
• Cutting operating costs/IT costs
• Preserving existing revenue streams

So with this in mind, do you think it will be possible to make further Customer Service improvements and cut costs?  The results also indicated that growth will be limited as companies work to preserve existing revenue streams.  These results, indicate that recovery will be slow and reiterate the Bank of England view on the longer than expected recovery.

The Institute of Customer Services Customer Satisfaction results clearly show that service matters, as can be seen in these associated articles:

• UK Customer Satisfaction Index July 2011 – executive summary
• first direct and instilling a customer service DNA

Please comment on if you agree with the key priorities, what are your priorities.  It would be good to get some feedback from a range of industries and share some points on plans to make this happen.

Whilst shared service centers may have their critics who claim that projects fail because they cause a disruption to the service flow by moving the work to a central location and creating failure demand, the facts certainly support in favor of the benefits service centers bring – particularly in times of economic uncertainty when administrative costs seem to rise and the burden of legislation appears to grow heavier.

Back office environments have the scale and scope to deliver great operational efficiencies so investing time and money to performance manage these areas and understand how optimisation can reap significant financial rewards is worthwhile.

We are interested in your thoughts, do you agree with some of our clients and think they deliver?

Please feel free to comment people or email ask@eguk.co.uk

Further reading……

Read the case study of how in creating this shared service centre benefits included improved productivity with less staff, backlogs were cleared, visibility over performance and quality resulted in recognition of best practice standards and the morale of staff improved.

More reading on shared service centers

eg offer a free on site review to help you understand the operational improvements that could be made.  Just give us a call on 01785 715772 or email ask and we can talk you through how this could apply to you and deliver real benefits – guaranteed.

eg’s CEO, Elizabeth Gooch summarised thoughts as follows:

“One of the issues here 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.

Unlike call centres, where the one main input channel is 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. However, transactional processing has the scale and scope to deliver great operational efficiencies so investing time and money to performance manage these back office areas should reap significant financial rewards – businesses need to reduce cost.

I disagree that there is an emerging class of Back Office Workforce Optimisation tools are designed to accommodate the issues in the Back Office. Back office planning is not the same as front office and it is this misconception that prevents WFM tools being used effectively in the back office as they do not address core requirements of back office operating environments (latency, backlogs, multiple channels etc). There is only one back office product on the market that properly addresses all of the requirements of the back office and since it has been around for many years it can hardly be called ‘emerging’.

Adrian’s point about the cultural and behavioural challenges are true and should not be ignored. The tools will only give you partial benefits. It is the Managers and Team Leaders using those tools that will deliver the real benefits with the right training.

I think the biggest factor that stops people using WFM for back office planning is that ultimately these are not fit for purpose. End users with back-office WFM needs should ensure that the solution they select can effectively meet all of their requirements for specific back-office processes, ideally with purpose built functionality that works”.

In response to this one of the members posted:

What a great post. I can’t comment on the different vendors but you make some really great points. Back office environments are so diverse – even in my own organisation I’ve yet to find two that are the same! Thus we use bespoke methods to plan for them in order to make our planning relevant and meaningful.

Read the full conversation http://linkd.in/tbLdqG or comment here on your thoughts.

I think that your question has two points to it. Firstly which back office solutions can use the cloud rather than having to rely on desk-top applications to capture relevant back office data. Secondly, which solutions also provide sufficient flexibility to integrate with existing solutions such as WFM. eg’s back office optimisation software suite provides the most complete functionality on the market whilst delivering guaranteed benefits together with being fully accessible from the cloud. Standard integration components are also included that can use a secure gateway to our cloud service to allow data exchange with our back office solutions. I would be more than happy to share further details either directly; through this post or at the upcoming PPF Best Practice Seminar in Altrincham on 3 November.

“To become the experts in task and process data capture should the Planning team start by tracking and forecasting their own workloads?”

How long does it take to authorise a holiday, and how many holiday requests do you receive per day, per week, per month, etc? Do you receive more holiday requests at the start or end of each week? Do you receive more holiday requests in some months than others? When did you last review your holiday process and when the process last refined?

I’ve used annual leave/holidays as an example but these questions could be applied almost everything resource planning do.

For me the big question is: “Could Resource Planners plan their time, workload and schedule better by using the best practice principles they apply to their organisation?”

My response to the above: In my experience, having been involved with data capture for many years, I would agree that the best practice principles that resource planners apply across their organisation are absolutely applicable within their own teams. Any business area that receives work items that require any form of processing adds an operating cost – and it is foreseeing and controlling this cost that is the ultimate challenge.

The ‘holiday request’ example you have used illustrates the many associated factors that need to be considered when creating a resource plan – accurate data capture at key facets of this process would enable planners themselves to better understand the trend in these requests (volumes/date received), and armed with this information can seek to better plan their own workloads. The data also enables analysis of such processes as part of any process improvement initiatives – the outcomes of which may be to introduce service levels/cut off dates for holiday requests to add an element of ‘control’ and enable a better level of forecasting from which to plan.

The need to identify metrics/KPI’s to measure performance and better facilitate planning & forecasting is absolutely relevant across all teams and enables work optimisation, and collecting the right data at the right level requires intelligent operations management.

A number of eg’s clients have successfully implemented Back Office Optimisation software to capture and transform the detail of every activity and interaction with a process or customer into a three-dimensional view of their operation. It is through this data capture that they can plan their time, workload and schedules more effectively.

If anyone wants to know more about their approach to data capture please email me and I can put you in touch with these clients to share ideas – ask@eguk.co.uk

I have heard long is anything between 36-60 months and i’d be interested to get a poll going on what is the most common for all three terms – please let me know your thoughts?  Here were some of the responses:

1. We define long term as the point at which you can recruit staff and get them trained to complete the work, currently 8 weeks, although we often use the word strategic and then anything before that is short term or tactical. We have detailed plans for 18 months and only occasionally are required to go longer than that. We don’t have mid ter.
Rachel, this is a very interesting question where the answer depends on the processes and more importantly the culture of the organisation we are discussing. But let me see if I can share what we see across the entire Customer Contact Industry (Front Office, Back Office, Email, Field etc…)

2. Long term is very much around what Graham said earlier in this thread, it’s the part of the planning process where you set your stake in the ground to set your capacity requirements (staff, desks, lines, IT, licences etc.) This can be anything from 12 months through to 5 to 7 years out. I’m not convinced in the accuracy of ANY forecast 5 years out, but that isn’t the point of the plan, to be accurate, it’s about being representative.

This is the key point of the transition from Long term to Midterm forecasting. This is where the stake in the ground is then required to be more than representative of demand; it needs to become a robust reflection of anticipated demand, so scheduling, investment and operational decisions can be made with confidence. This is usually ALWAYS within year, sometime rolling 12 months or often just within the live financial year for the organisation. We need to start to manage not just the level of demand we receive but to begin to profile it (What, When, Who, How and Why) which is what makes forecasting a full time role. Understanding this historically and predicting the impacts of ALL operational activity is what makes this such a demanding and specialist role. (Also often tied into the finance RAF process)

And I suppose this is also a hint of when a forecast becomes short term. When is it “handed over” from the forecaster to the operation or the real time function? How far out is this? Well what is it being used for? If I use front office as an example, if we are looking to produce flexible schedules/rotas then a strong short term forecast is very important, can be considered short term as far as 12 weeks out (as THIS is one of the key uses for the forecast). If we have an environment where the shifts are fixed, it’s the planning of offline activity which we have in our arsenal to deliver the best service possible, so the short term can be anything from 6 weeks out to the day before!. I would always expect the level of demand for a customer contact environment to have been forecast up to 8 times for any single day before you actually get to the day it’s being used for
1. Longterm
2. Midterm
3. Midterm RAF
4. Midterm / shorter handover
5. Monthly reforecast
6. Weekly reforecast
7. 2 days out
8. 1 day out…..

So the answer is a set one, it’s about how you intend to use the forecast and where the planning process sits within your culture and environment, but hopefully you can see often what dictates the terms is the importance we put upon i.

3. Well, this is a question with several answers i guess. When we started using forecasting in Operational Intelligence we plan for three months. In our business the amount of work change from period to period and it could be a waste of time planning long term. We have made some plans for 12 months, in areas with more predictability, but mainly doing a three months plan. The long term planning is more linked up to the budged, and number of employees and than it’s mainly 12 months planning. We have no shorter planning than three months, but this could be more relevant in the future.

Some varied comments and much variance between how organisations view this.  I’ll be certain to make sure we touch on this at the forthcoming focus group in Birmingham.

What do you think? Why not join the back office optimisation linked in group too.

Read the Forecasting data sheet.