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Back Office Scheduling - A Critical Component for Improving Organizational Efficiency

by Bob Webb, VP Sales, Pipkins, Inc. - October 7, 2011

Back Office Scheduling – A Critical Component for Improving

Organizational Efficiency

By: Bob Webb, VP Sales, Pipkins, Inc.

When it comes to staffing requirements and operational performance goals, every organization is vastly different. Ensuring you have the proper number and types of employees scheduled to manage your back office at any given time can be a challenge, especially if you have little to no visibility into what you needed yesterday, last week, or last season to use as a basis for forecasting. Enterprise workforce management (EWM) solutions improve operations, make performance tracking easier, and help companies improve the customer experience in the front office. But the customer experience does not stop with the contact center. It extends to encompass the business processes that take place in the back office – processes like loan applications, administration, and finance.

To improve quality, enhance customer experience, increase operating efficiency, lift productivity and reduce attrition, it is critical for companies to be able to properly forecast and schedule back office employees, track their adherence in real time, and streamline the workflow between the front and back office.

Enterprise Workforce Management

Forecasting and scheduling is the central nervous system of your enterprise. Using screen capture to generate average handle time (AHT) data for back office functions, EWM now becomes forecastable. With realtime adherence analytics available by individual or key performance indicator (KPI), it is easy for managers and

supervisors to see how the organization is performing against set targets and goals. EWM automates manual processes, integrates data collected from employee desktops, improves forecast accuracy, enables managers to view and manage resource capacity, and empowers employees to improve their own performance.

Challenges of Enterprise Workforce Management

As new technology becomes available and organizations implement solutions hoping to solve business challenges, they end up with a loosely integrated group of disparate systems. In an environment where each element was not designed to work with the others, many challenges arise, including high costs, technology and staffing inefficiencies, poor performance quality, and most importantly, no real-time view into adherence.

Furthermore, the lack of an expert technology partner to help you manage a centralized or dispersed workforce with varied skills presents hurdles to assessing, comparing, and improving back office performance.

Workforce Management

Workforce Management features a number of key functions to improve forecast accuracy and streamline planning, while enabling supervisors to monitor real-time employee activities, and properly view and manage resource capacity, including:

  • Integrating with desktop process management software to automatically calculate average handle time, making this forecastable data
  • Accurately calculating the number of employees needed to process work items in single and multi-site environments
  • Supporting any scheduling environment and optimizing task assignments
  • Utilizing sophisticated algorithms to create schedules that ensure the right number of employees are scheduled to handle the predicted workload based on service level goals

Workforce Management for the back office enables you to:

  • Reduce administrative time and increase supervisor productivity by automating and streamlining manual tasks associated with forecasting and managing resource capacity
  • Manage resources more effectively and reduce costs associated with overtime and overstaffing by improving forecast accuracy
  • Increase employee satisfaction and reduce attrition by empowering employees to self-manage scheduling and time-off requests
  • Improve employee productivity by leveraging comprehensive data for assessing performance, identifying skill gaps, and measuring improvement
  • Improve customer satisfaction by streamlining back office tasks like application approval, claims processing and order fulfillment

Performance Management

Performance Management features a number of key capabilities to help improve your capacity for strategic planning, provide visibility into operational performance results against objectives, gain insight into specific areas that require extra focus and ensure your back office performance is aligned with overall corporate objectives, including:

  • Screen and configure data capture enables you to associate an AHT with various tasks and types of Interactions
  • Built-in KPIs and metrics to assess individual, department and business performance
  • Scorecards for back-office employees to view their current and past performance
  • Performance dashboards for at-a-glance views of performance with drill-down capabilities by employee or KPI
  • Reporting that can be customized for managers, supervisors and executives

Performance Management for the back office enables you to:

  • Forecast staffing using AHT data based on total interaction time, including screens and keystrokes
  • Track how employees are sticking to schedules and working toward achieving objectives by monitoring schedule adherence in real time
  • Make smarter decisions about staffing based on real-time, actionable performance analytics
  • Aggregate a complete view of all performance data in a single database that can be tied to the contact center
  • Improve employee performance by enabling them to address skill gaps and improve performance on their own
  • Increase efficiency and reduce costs by automating routine tasks and reporting on performance hourly, daily, weekly for any internal audience

Your customer experience starts with proper forecasting and scheduling of back office employees. A great customer experience is created by both front and back office activities, optimal performance from employees, and streamlined workflow between the front and back office.

About Pipkins

Pipkins, Inc. is a leading supplier of workforce management software and services to the call center industry. For the past twenty-eight years, Pipkins has created and delivered superior workforce management products for call centers of all sizes with thirteen industry-first applications. Vantage Point, Pipkins’ premier product, is the most accurate forecasting and scheduling tool on the market. Pipkins’ systems forecast and schedule more than 300,000 agents in over 500 locations across all industries worldwide. For more information, visit www.Pipkins.com.

 
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