While customer satisfaction is crucial for any business to manage and improve their operations, never forget that back office staff people are working behind the scenes in administrative or support roles to meet customer requirements. Their support to the front-end staff is indispensable. With increase in customer demands, outsourced solutions are also available to meet backend processes. Focusing only on improving customer care or just on back office technology will not improve your business, just because both are interrelated. Back office operations are the key to customer service. If the back office fails to deliver, customer service quality would fall, leading to frustrated customers. For instance, in finance firms, failure in back office processes such as record maintenance, operations, I.T services, HR and administration can result in client dissatisfaction.
Financial Firms Investing More in Improving Customer Experience than Back-Office Functions
According to a research report by Pinsent Masons, an international law firm, financial service firms are prioritizing customer experience enhancements over back office IT systems.
Based on this survey response,
- 2% of high-growth financial firms said they had prioritized investment in back office technology over the last three years, while
- 77% said they had prioritized investment in customer-facing improvements
Financial services experts recommend all firms to invest in back office technology to reduce the risk of operational incidents, such as system failures and data breaches. The study says that businesses focusing too much on externally-facing tech rather than internal systems and processes may be foregoing a huge opportunity for enhancing productivity.
To stay ahead of the curve, businesses are also investing in new technology through mergers and acquisitions (M&A). While 70% of financial firms consider acquiring new technology as the most important objective of an M&A strategy, only 46% think increasing market share is the most important objective.
The research also highlighted that more and more financial services companies are now entering into alliances and joint ventures with other companies to give them greater access to that business’ talent, technology and market.
Back Office Staff – The Unsung Heroes of Business Management
Though back office staff may not be dealing directly with the client, they are dealing with all the customer requirements and thus play a significant role in ensuring successful outcomes. Back office efforts lead to the improvement of the overall customer experience. To serve customers better, front end or customer care staff requires diverse information, paperwork, details of products and more to help them. Such details will be provided by the back office and they ensure that the wait time will be the minimum for customers. Handling these back office tasks perfectly helps the frontend staff to focus on their core job and the customers will be provided top class service consistently.
Considering back office as secondary does not work. Integrated back office solutions can also improve communication between various departments. Combining the work processes between the customer service and back end teams also allows businesses to reduce their administrative costs and shorten the amount of time and effort they would need to spend on each customer.
Automation Works to Improve Customer Service
Advanced technology available now helps to automate backend works, leading to increased productivity and outstanding customer service. IT-enabled operations include automating processes and using advanced IT solutions to manage daily operations. Manual processes such as document scanning can be done using software. When it comes to healthcare practices, back–office technology makes it easy to perform everyday tasks like compiling and storing medical records, scheduling staff, reserving operating rooms, and billing patients.
Companies are also considering artificial intelligence (AI) solutions to meet their back office requirements. For instance, Computer Weekly.com reports that AXA, an insurance giant has recruited software robots to take over repetitive tasks and free up humans to do more analytical work. This also helps to reduce the amount of repetitive work administrative staff needs to do. Based on reports, these robots takes only 42 seconds to read customer correspondence and match it with their account details, while it takes four minutes for a human.
Back office outsourcing companies provide IT staff outsourcing services for businesses looking for permanent staff such as mobile developers, CAD engineers and animation designers or additional expertise to handle immediate project requirements. Such outsourcing services help organizations deliver projects in lesser time and at affordable prices.
