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Consumers expect more from businesses than ever before — and many organisations are struggling to keep pace.
Eighty-six percent of consumers surveyed in “The State of Customer Experience” said a company is only as good as its service. Just 43% of those surveyed said they’ve felt like a highly valued and appreciated customer at the end of an interaction. Much of this customer dissatisfaction originates in back-office departments like claims, accounting and IT services — and a lack of processes and communications can make it difficult for a frontline agent to service a customer effectively.
Many interactions involving a customer service agent like a loan application, service request or fraud claim trigger a follow-up action with another department. Once the follow-up action moves to another department or into a disparate system, it falls into a black hole because organisations often struggle with these siloed systems, manual workarounds and the inability to track tasks across departments.
This makes it difficult to classify and prioritise work; measure and report on employee utilisation; balance the employee workload; and plan resourcing. All this results in missed deadlines, human error and work backlogs — frustrating everyone involved.
While many organisations have invested in modernising their contact centre infrastructures, there are still significant opportunities to modernise their back-office functions. In fact, 38% of surveyed banking executives said accelerating digital transformation of the middle and back offices will be crucial to their service-model development.
In this post, we’ll explore the landscape of back-office technologies. And we’ll see how new cloud contact centre capabilities can help enterprises connect the front and back office so they can more effectively solve customer-related tasks and follow-ups – and provide great customer experience.
The Back-Breaking Reality of Back-Office Technologies
Let’s start by defining what’s involved in a typical customer service request. A work item or task is any type of customer request submitted from within or outside a contact centre interaction. This includes a support ticket, claim, billing inquiry or sales/marketing lead. Typically, these tasks are offline and have associated service-level agreements (SLAs), such as 24 or 48 hours; they might be fully unattended, agent-assisted or a mix of both self-service and agent-assisted.
Business Process Management Systems
Business process management (BPM) systems help integrate and automate much of the back-office processing. BPM software connects multiple disparate systems such as enterprise resource planning systems. However, BPM systems typically lack contact centre capabilities.
Contact Centre Software
Contact centre software provides visibility and accountability for contact centre interactions across multiple channels like phone calls, email and texts. But the software can lose visibility after these interactions are closed.
Robotic Process Automation
Robotic process automation (RPA) helps expedite process completion by automating repetitive, low-value tasks. But the scope of RPA is limited.
Desktop Analytics
With desktop analytics, contact centre managers can understand what’s happening on an employee’s screen while they’re interacting with a customer — and if those behaviours are consistent with what’s being said. This has proven to be effective in managing and controlling large operations in diverse geographies that involve multiple outsourcings.
The Systemic Problem of Siloed Systems
But notice these are all separate systems. That siloed approach – where every single piece of the entire process is handled through different systems – doesn’t guarantee a timely solution.
And as processes become more complex while existing technologies remain stagnant, the need for an efficient solution grows.
The right contact centre solution connects your front and back office so you have a single source of truth. This capability enables your employees to complete their work effectively and deliver customer follow-ups on time.
Breaking Down Silos with Work Automation and Task Routing
Work automation and task routing capabilities of the Genesys Cloud™ platform provide APIs to integrate all siloed systems, such as Salesforce, ServiceNow and case management systems, to bring data into a single view. This involves four phases:
Capture. Groups all work together, consolidating CRM system, BPM/ticketing and post-interaction work.
Manage. Prioritises and establishes business flows by applying business rules for attributes like due dates, dollar values and website addresses.
Automate. Increase operational efficiency with full end-to-end visibility into the service and processes.
Distribute. Distributes tasks in workbins to skilled and available resources (similar to queues in the contact centre).
Analyse. Delivers on SLAs and maintains work balance with automation workflows.
Discover the Benefits of Work Automation and Task Routing
The business benefits of these capabilities include meeting and exceeding your SLAs; increasing your operational efficiency through automation and proactive work distribution; guaranteeing a fair workload distribution; and improving the customer experience through orchestrated end-to-end experiences that extend beyond single interactions.
Contact centre agents are empowered to make informed decisions in real time with a consolidated view of all their work enabled by fully extensible APIs that integrate siloed systems into this single view. They can enhance their performance and become more productive with an intuitive graphical interface that defines target SLAs per workbin or queue. This also allows for the customisation or task stages, transitions and actions.
