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What is Back Office? What does Back Office mean in the contact center space? What should someone consider when looking for a back office solution?
Calabrio Shorts is a fun-sized podcast that covers all sorts of topics around the contact center industry. No topic is off-limits as we cover frequently asked questions, industry trends and definitions, and yes, we will have fun doing it.
Shorts Back Office
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[00:00:00] Dave: Welcome to Calabrio shorts, where we take a range of topics for the contact center industry and make sure you have the information you need to make informed decisions. We appreciate you listening. So without further ado here is Calabrio's product evangelist, Dave bookstore. Today's topic is back office.
We get asked a lot about back office, but we want to Tanny take you back to the beginning. What is back office and why should anyone care what back office is or does that's where we want to talk about today. So let's, let's tackle that right. Back office is a term that in contact centers, well, lets us know that we're usually talking about off the phone work.
When we say off the phone, it means non-voice. So for example, taking calls would not be back office, but emails and chats. Could we refer to as back office, but in the last. Five years or so [00:01:00] the lines have been kind of blurry between back office and a chats and emails. So we're actually going to leave them out of the conversation in this case, if you're curious about chats and emails, those are things that are pretty common in a day to day contact center world, but back office gets outside of the norm a little bit.
So let's start there. Back office usually refers to anything that someone has to work on that doesn't necessarily have a. Instant demand to work. A good example of a back office task might be a mortgage application for a bank or maybe something that has to do with filling out paperwork or receiving paperwork, faxing paperwork, things that don't necessarily have the instantaneous demand of a phone call or an email or a chat that often is what we refer to.
When we talk about back office. But it's a pretty ambiguous category. The biggest problem that most people struggle with is not defining what back office means, but [00:02:00] how do we wrap our arms around the work that's required with backup? This could entail scheduling back office agents or forecasting back office volumes.
So how many mortgage applications are we going to receive, or how many people does it take for me to work through these mortgage applications and how many of them are going to receive? Those are all questions that organizations really struggle with. And when we talk about why back office is important we have to talk about the process and this is what.
Becomes a real struggle for a lot of organizations. When we talk about a voice call, we get a pretty good picture of everything that happens in that call. We usually record the call. We have the phone system tracking when the call comes in, when the hang up, how many times the person gets put on hold, what the handle time of the call is how many times the we pause in it.
The after call work time. Those are all really easy numbers to get our hands on. But if we [00:03:00] take the work off of the phones and we give it to an individual and say, here's a list of 300 applications that need to be processed, they'll work. We tend to lose a lot of that tracking ability. And what happens as a result is that we usually see kind of a drop in efficiency over time.
Unfortunately, as people work, these, they, they start to learn where they can kind of get away with little things and where they can't. So we often see a lot of various. People taking advantage of those kinds of situations. So organizations reach out to Calabrio to ask how they can get their arms around those kinds of things.
And we have lots of great tools that help us do that. But the key before we talk about the tool is the integration. And this is where we usually get to the big sticking point. Very easy for Calabrio to connect into your common phone systems that are out there. There are many, many of them out there by many different manufacturers that we have prebuilt [00:04:00] integrations to that collect all the data we need, but not a lot of integrations into.
A homegrown mortgage application system or a homegrown CRM that handles that brings in emails. So that's where we typically get the biggest question is can we integrate and can we get that information? And generally the answer is yes, but the biggest question we often have to throw to people is, okay, how do you get that information?
And a lot of times we get a nice, solid blank stare. We don't, we were hoping you could get that for us. So the real question becomes, if you can't get to that information, then there's very likely chance that Calabrio can't get to that information. So we usually have to figure something out. Do we need to implement a manual process that helps us track the number of things that are being worked?
Or is there a database on the backend that we can somehow connect to and pull that information? [00:05:00] From those are the kinds of questions that we typically have to tackle. When we talk about back office. So you could have very, very long processes where people are working a help desk ticket for over three or four days.
How do you get a handle time for that kind of information? It's very difficult. So when we talk about back office, we usually kind of have to ask a couple questions. How are we going to integrate to the data so we can create a forecast for that, or we can measure and track. The kind of efficiency that's out there, but we also have to ask, what are these people going to be doing?
How long is the process? What do we have to understand about it? And then what system are they using to be able to process these? Do we need to build something that can help track this organization? Those are kind of things that really come into play. When we talk about back office and the functions and the process of how that works, certainly, hopefully this [00:06:00] gives you a really good at least primer to how back office works and what to tackle.
But certainly if you have questions we're here for you. So please do not hesitate to reach out to us at calabrio.com to give us more information about how you want to maybe approach a back-office. Type of process, but we'll certainly give it to you straight and make sure you understand all the ins and outs of how back office works.
And so please don't hesitate to reach out to us. Thanks. And we'll talk to you on the next one. .