Spencer O’Leary, CEO of ActiveOps North America, discusses why organizations should dismantle the traditional barriers between front- and back-office teams and take a more holistic view of their operations. The benefits: reduced cost, better customer service, and more engaged employees.
Traditional organizational structures assign operations leaders a specific remit: management of either the front office (typically, customer-facing departments) or the back office (settlements, accounting, data processing, and so on). This functional isolation makes it easier for ops leaders to optimize their department. However, segmentation of workers into task-focused groups introduces an inherent inflexibility when one group interfaces with the output from another group, which leads to a reduction in an organization’s overall operational efficiency.
Importantly, this approach can deliver excellent customer service — but at the cost of idling valuable resources. In the front office, you might need 100 call-center staff available when the phone lines open at 9 a.m. But 15 minutes later, when call volumes drop, you may only need 80 of them.
Clearly, you cannot employ people for 15-minute intervals, so at best you’ll have a surplus of 20 people for most of a four-hour shift, creating a constant oversupply of resources in the front office to meet the operational requirements for an excellent customer experience.
Over in the back office, organizations may experience an undersupply of resources when work volumes fluctuate. Knowing who is available for assignment to these tasks, and when, is a challenge.
This conundrum has sparked a ‘light bulb moment’ among some operations leaders, who asked, “what if we could share resources across the front and back office?”
They realized that by training and redirecting staff to perform specific tasks in a different department, they could smooth out the peaks and valleys of available resources in both offices. For instance, if the settlements team is managing through a heavy load, shifting a call-center team member to handle customer-service tasks in the back office, they can rebalance highly specialized back-office resources and ensure they meet their deadlines.
How does this work in practice? I asked Tom Frosina, head of card operations at TD Bank, who manages a busy front-line contact center operation as well as the back-office data side of the business. He’s taken steps to ensure that he can move resources between the two groups by ensuring his back-office folks started to cross-train themselves with adjacent groups to enable load balancing.
“The challenge for us is that we’d get a big uptick in one area of regulatory business. I couldn’t necessarily take somebody off the phones and just say, ‘Hey, go and work in this highly technical department and knock out some paperwork’ — that wasn’t going to work,” says Frosina. “But what I could do is move one of my phone people into a customer-service role in the back office, which was a very similar job. I would then move that back-office person one step over to a role for which they had the training, and then move that person one step over. By using these two- or three-way trades internally, we can ensure we’re moving people into roles where they already have the required experience and knowledge.”
Historically, attempts to share resources across the front and back office have been stymied by the fact that organizations haven’t had access to the data and technology needed to identify and respond to shifts in resources and workloads in real time. Frosina uses decision intelligence technology, so his managers can continually capture key operational data, better understand the dynamics of their business capacity, and then apply real-time analytics to implement workflows that efficiently optimize and allocate resources.
This more integrated approach for front- and back-office teams is seeing success at other American banks and insurance companies, many of which are currently facing an urgent need to cut costs while meeting heightened customer expectations and needs. This approach is driving more efficient work allocation and enabling employees to learn new skills beyond their usual roles. Consequently, employee attrition rates have decreased, and the organization is now equipped to manage workload fluctuations without the need for constant hiring. Another bonus: it has helped boost the organization’s agility, thereby enhancing future resiliency.
So, how do you get started? I asked TD Bank’s Frosina to provide some pro tips for those looking to share resources between front and back offices.
“First, don’t assume you can take a person who’s inexperienced and put them into a really challenging role. It’s a negative experience for that person and drags down that team. Assess which team members are ready and eager to take on something new, and get some cross-training under your belt so that you’ve identified and skilled-up key shareable and moveable resources,” he says.
“Also, monitor performance carefully and don’t be afraid to switch people out if it’s clearly not working for that person. What we found works best is to set up cross-skilling on a rotational basis, so a team member experiences a new role for anywhere from four to eight weeks. This gives you the flexibility to move them back to their original role or on to something different if they’re struggling — or to extend their transfer if they’re performing really well in the new role.”
Think about how you might optimize your operational efficiency by sharing and exchanging resources between your front and back offices. Also, look for ways to reduce staffing and data silos — and consider how applying operational intelligence could enable better and more informed decisions about resource allocation. My prediction: a flexible approach to resource allocation will boost your overall customer-service metrics, enhance employee engagement and satisfaction, and deliver bottom-line cost efficiencies.
