Solve 3 Back-Office Problems with “Quick to Try” Solutions

Mary Lou Joseph October 18, 2018

Back-office managers have every reason to be leery of a new application or system that will “make their lives easier.” Legacy BPM, workflow, ERP and CRM systems have been costly, time-consuming and sometimes painful installs that often failed to deliver the promised value.

However, things are changing.

In a McKinsey Quarterly article, Accelerating the shift to a next-generation operating model,1 the authors state that, “Next-generation companies find it more practical to select and quickly try out tools that could help resolve serious performance problems. Fortunately, the low cost and straightforward integration pathways for new technologies allow companies to stage and learn from technology experiments using small amounts of money and modest commitments of time from an IT function.”

In an effort to help companies simplify, modernize and automate, Verint offers some quick-to-deploy and quick-to-value solutions to solve three common business problems in back-office operations:

  • Employee Productivity
  • Service Level Achievement
  • Cumbersome Processes and Tasks.

Employee Productivity: Many back-office organizations struggle just to understand how employees are spending their time. They often build in excess “shrinkage” or over staff to ensure there are enough resources on hand to meet their service goals. Verint Operations Visualizer is a quick to implement solution that gives managers and employees visibility into how time is being spent, in what applications, and whether the activities are production or non-production related. The data is displayed in an easy to understand scorecard. Simply seeing how time is spent vs. goal typically increases productivity by 10% within the first few weeks as employees self-correct behaviors and focus more on production-related activities.

Service Level Achievement (SLA): One of the biggest challenges in back-office operations is the sheer volume of activity types and systems used to process the different kinds of work. These systems are often legacy systems from which it is difficult to extract data or integrate. Verint Work Manager uses pre-built connectors and adaptors to get the data needed on work volumes and types, regardless of source system, without extensive need for IT resources. The solution captures and prioritizes all the work items and presents to the appropriately skilled employee the next best work item to execute. The solution tracks work against service goals, sending alerts that enable managers to proactively adjust workloads intraday to help ensure SLAs are met. Organizations have achieved 10-16% improvement in productivity and capacity in as few as 8 weeks with Verint Work Manager.

Cumbersome Processes and Tasks: Processing work done in the back office is often complex, multi-touch, and includes a number of tedious, repetitive tasks, like cutting and pasting information from one system to another–see earlier comment about system integrations. 🙂 In lieu of a major process re-engineering effort, organizations can use solutions such as Verint Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Process Assistant to alleviate some of the burden. RPA can automate the repetitive, rules-based tasks, freeing up employees for more challenging tasks. Process Assistant can provide real-time, contextual process guidance, walking an employee through a complex process to help ensure all steps are completed accurately. Organizations can cut the time to process dramatically with RPA and Process Assistant.

These solutions can start organizations on the journey toward modernizing and automating their back-office operations without a large upfront cost. They can achieve quick return on investment which can fund investments in further improvements and more “advanced technologies to improve their behind-the-scenes operations.”1

To learn more about these solutions, please visit Back Office Solutions.

You might also enjoy Back-Office Operations: How Can You Balance Cost and Service?

 

1 Accelerating the shift to a next-generation operating model, by Albert Bollard, Ewan Duncan, Petko Rangelov, and Marta Rohr, McKinsey Quarterly, December 2017