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Back Office Virtual Roundtable 2016 About NICE NICE (Nasdaq: NICE) is the worldwide leading provider of both cloud and on-premise enterprise software solutions that empower organizations to make smarter decisions based on advanced analytics of structured and unstructured data. NICE helps organizations of all sizes deliver better customer service, ensure compliance, combat fraud and safeguard citizens. Over 22,000 organizations in more than 150 countries, including over 80 of the Fortune 100 companies, are using NICE solutions. www.nice.com Workforce Optimization in the Back Office

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Page 1: Back Office Virtual Roundtable 2016 - NICE Ltd. · Back Office Virtual Roundtable 2016 About NICE NICE (Nasdaq: NICE) is the worldwide leading provider of both ... Bringing Front

Back Office Virtual Roundtable2016

About NICENICE (Nasdaq: NICE) is the worldwide leading provider of both cloud and on-premise enterprise software solutions that empower organizations to make smarter decisions based on advanced analytics of structured and unstructured data. NICE helps organizations of all sizes deliver better customer service, ensure compliance, combat fraud and safeguard citizens. Over 22,000 organizations in more than 150 countries, including over 80 of the Fortune 100 companies, are using NICE solutions.

www.nice.com

Workforce Optimizationin the Back Office

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Overview.................................................................................................4

Who Was There?............................................................................6

Bringing Front Office Workforce Management Into the

Back Office....................................................................................8

What is Happening in Today’s Back Office: Some Trends............12

Key Back Office Challenges: ‘You Can’t Measure What You

Can’t See’....................................................................................18

Back Office Workforce Management: The Proficiency

Solution........................................................................................26

Back Office Use Cases: From Greater Insight to a More

Effective Workforce.......................................................................40

Summary......................................................................................46

Table of Contents

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Overveiw The topics covered were:

On the 27th of September, NICE Systems brought together

around 30 participants for a multinational roundtable meeting

to discuss the application of workforce management principles,

techniques and technologies in the corporate back office.

Participants highlighted the specific challenges commonly

faced in increasing visibility into back office productivity, as well

as the significant advantages that can quickly be gained for

improved processes and employee schedule adherence.

2 3

• Back Office WFM vs. Contact Center WFM

• Back Office trends

• Back Office challenges

• Back Office use cases (Optum and Verizon)

• Lessons learned

The discussion was led by NICE Back Office solutions experts,

as well as workforce managers with Optum-UHG and Verizon

Enterprise.

Back to contents >>

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6

Who Was There?

Optum, owned by the UnitedHealth

Group, is a health services and innovation

company with 150 locations worldwide.

Using advanced technology, management

services and data analytics, Optum

focuses on modernizing infrastructure,

advancing care and empowering

consumers. Optum uses workforce

management solutions both in house and

on behalf of their clients.

6 7

Verizon Enterprise Solutions is a

division of Verizon Communications,

a broadband telecommunications

company and one of the largest

American wireless communications

service providers. Verizon Enterprise

provides back office services and

products for Verizon’s business and

government clients around the world.

State Farm is an American group

of insurance and financial services

companies in the United States, with

several wholly owned subsidiaries

throughout the United States.

Walmart is a leading American multinational

retail corporation that operates a chain of

hypermarkets, discount department stores

and grocery stores in 28 countries. As of

2016, it is the world’s largest company by

revenue and the largest private employer in

the world, with 2.2 million employees. Back to contents >>

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Even with extensive experience managing personnel, schedules

and forecasting in the contact center, enterprises found it difficult

to translate that knowledge into effective back office workforce

management. Whereas in a contact center you have visibility

literally down to the second, this is often not true in the back office.

The differences between workforce

management in the back office and in the

front office surely start with visibility, as the

NICE representatives noted, but they do

not end there.

Bringing FrontOffice

WorkforceManagement Into the BackOffice

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• There is high visibility into employee productivity.

• Forecasting focuses on immediate needs.

• Employee schedules are determined by contact volumes per interval.

• There is intraday tracking of service levels and abandon rates.

• The operational terminology emphasizes: contacts, abandons, agents.

• Historical data, such as average handle times, can be gleaned from automated call distribution tracking.

• There is low visibility into employee productivity.

• Forecasting requires taking into account deferrable and multi-step work.

• There is more of a focus on the type of work each employee does than on start/stop times.

• Intraday tracking notes service levels and backlogs.

• The operational terminology emphasizes: work items, backlog, employees.

• Historical data has to be collected from multiple systems, generally without reference to average handle times.

In the Contact Center: In the Back Office:

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Questions of visibility and productivity

monitoring in the back office are becoming

more important, as companies are looking

into the role of the back office in improving

overall performance. This is related

to three current trends in the service-

oriented industries: numbers, flexibility, and

automation.

What is Happeningin Today’s

Back Office:Some Trends

Numbers Flexibility Automation

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There are far more back office workers

than front office workers, on a percentage

basis, in many developed countries,

according to research by DMG Consulting.

In the United States, for example,

DMG found that there are an estimated

2.5 times the number of back office

employees as front office employees (cited

in DMG’s February 2016 WFM Report).

For the most part,

participants in the

roundtable said

their organizations

confirmed or

exceeded the

above ratio of

back to front office

personnel, with

some citing 3:1,

4:1, or even 5:1.

Even those noting

a ratio closer to

2:1 added that, as

real data is being

collected currently,

they are discovering

their company may

have more people

than expected

doing back office

work and they can

easily see how the

numbers might

reach 2.5:1 or even

higher.

This reflected

a general

understanding

that the observed

numbers may

reflect back

office workforce

management

maturity, in that

the more data you

collect, the more

you see. The more

you can see, the

better you can

manage employee

schedules and

forecast accordingly

to maximize

your back office

potential.

Numbers

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The Society of Workforce Planning

Professionals found, based on a session

survey during their annual conference in

2016, that sharing work between front

and back offices is relatively common.

However, this makes measuring

productivity very difficult.

Workforce managers know precisely what

an employee is doing in the front office, but

they have generally had no way to continue

measuring productivity when the employee

moved into the back office to cover work

there. NICE was already observing this

problem often among its clients several

years ago, which guided the design of its

back office solution.

Flexibility Automation

With the progress

of technology,

companies are

moving toward

greater automation

of many processes.

In the back office,

according to data

collected from

NICE Systems

customers, this is

manifesting itself in

a growing tendency

toward automated

prioritization and

distribution of work

to the appropriate

teams within an

organization.

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“All of us have

sat in call centers

and wondered,

‘What are those

people doing over

there? They don’t

look like they’re

really working,’”

observed the

Optum workforce

operations

manager, by way

of introducing the

challenges of back

office workforce

management.

“’Couldn’t we use them? We have calls holding.’ Then we find out

they’re really working on something. But how do we track that and

predict to that level?”

KeyBack Office

Challenges‘You Can’tMeasure WhatYou Can’t See’

18 19

Visibility Measurement Complexity

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While a large part of the business of an

enterprise-scale organization takes place

in the back office, visibility into workforce

performance there is very often extremely

limited. In part, this is due to the nature

of the work, with virtual or physical

paperwork alongside the use of online

and offline desktop applications used in

deferrable processes. This makes it difficult

to track, which imposes limitations on

performance improvement efforts.

As the Optum workforce operations

manager at the roundtable observed

succinctly, “You can’t measure what you

can’t see. You can’t control it and you

can’t make it work better.”

As a result, back office employees are often given “carte blanche”

to do what they need to do, when they need to do it. This can

include entering their own working times in payroll, even though

there is no way to objectively track actual working hours or if their

time was spent on truly job-related activities. This is a growing

challenge today, as there are more and more work-at-home

employees without immediate supervisor oversight.

The weaknesses of such self-governed time studies or reporting

pose a problem not just due to potential dishonesty; rather, as

noted by a roundtable participant, the large number of back office

tasks per work type creates a growing risk of human error and

omission. Therefore, the most effective system would quantify and

measure time spent on each task, without dependence on input

directly from the employee.

This provides “a better infrastructure right from the foundation to

create a better capacity model, and then a system that’s driven

more on trust naturally, rather than just on inputs by your team

members.”

Visibility

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Part of the reason schedule adherence or levels of productivity

are not measured in the back office is the challenge of defining

what exactly to measure and how to measure it.

Enterprise representatives at the roundtable noted that

manual time studies are sometimes performed to determine

the amount of time it takes to complete work items, but such

studies do not drill down to look at the specific constituent

tasks involved.

Often, such studies are primitive and outdated – and becoming

more so as technology and processes change – as well as

lacking in follow-up studies to note the effects of changes

implemented based on their results.

In one case mentioned at the roundtable, the implementation

of an effective back office workforce management system

revealed a surprising weakness in the existing time tracking

tools the company was using. They discovered that they had

simply not been collecting accurate time data on productivity

for some time. “It was a very important part of the process,” the

company representative said, “and sometimes it was painful.”

The result can be

back office teams

with significant

backlogs and

phone queues,

which fall far below

defined service

level goals.

Measurement

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As noted, the back office is a

multifaceted work environment that is

often also intertwined with activity in

the contact center. While an automatic

call distribution (ACD) system may tell

you where a customer call went, the

details of what work is being done

and how long it will take require more

sophisticated technology.

To accurately and consistently provide data on performance

in the back office, a workforce management system must

therefore include the capability to track time spent by each

employee on every widget or program used for any given work

item. The solution must also be able to track deferred and

offline activities, in order to get a full performance picture.

Other aspects of the complexity of back office workforce

management highlighted at the roundtable included the need

to recognize employee successes and scheduling issues. It

takes very good data to avoid line imbalances in the back

office, such as some groups of employees putting in overtime

and other teams remaining not very busy. Similarly detailed and

accurate information is needed to reward those employees

who are working the hardest in a pay-for-performance initiative.

Without clarity regarding complex productivity levels, service

level performance goals can be missed and employees can be

frustrated.

Complexity

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Back Office Workforce Management:The

ProficiencySolution

The challenges to effective workforce

management in the back office can

be resolved by an effective and

comprehensive WFM system.

However, that is just the beginning. The

roundtable went on to identify three

practical stages needed to improve back

office proficiency once the WFM solution

is in place. In addition, participants

highlighted what actions they have

taken in their own organizations to help

streamline the implementation of their

workforce management solution.

Capture and Analyze PerformanceForecast and

Schedule

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Capture and Analyze

Useful back office analytics depends on an activity monitoring

system that resides on an employee’s desktop, collecting

data on applications used and processes undertaken. Then,

this data is analyzed to provide insight into productivity levels,

which can be drilled down into on a very granular level, and into

which back office processes are actually effective and efficient.

Among other questions desktop analytics can address are:

How many tasks require rework? How much time is spent on

knowledge sharing or learning? Which employees are taking

longer than necessary and which are developing best practices

that can be shared with the entire team?

In order to obtain that value from desktop analytics, a

participant in the roundtable emphasized, it is critical to know

what to measure and what can practically be measured. This

is especially true in a complex back office environment, or a

combined back and front office ecosystem. This means that

workforce managers must talk through the possibilities with

the company’s IT teams, business owners and team managers

for the most useful outcomes.

Even after identifying specific activities to measure, a good

back office workforce management solution will collect a

tremendous amount of data almost immediately. It is therefore

imperative that the workforce manager understands the

analytics thoroughly before sharing it further. “Analyze it, make

sure you understand it, and use that to move your staff in

the right places and the right times,” counseled the Optum

workforce manager.

Identifying, measuring and analyzing specific tasks provides

a “line of sight” into what everyone is doing. This, in turn, can

be used to establish time standards for better forecasting and

scheduling.

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The roundtable then turned to defining and distinguishing

productivity and process monitoring in the back office.

There are two mutually valuable

motivations to “move the needle” on

back office performance: a) improved

productivity will help ensure that such

work is not outsourced; and b) visibility into

productivity allows managers to recognize

those employees doing a good job, which

increases motivation and generates a

positive feedback loop.

At the same time, it was emphasized by

roundtable participants that managers

need to know how to use the performance

data they receive. “It’s not only what data

you get and what the teams do,” said a

senior workforce manager, “but how the

managers are using that data. We can

definitely see that managers who tend not

to ‘buy in’ to the data – their productivity

levels are lower.”

Process monitoring:

• You need to be able to measure both online and offline activity

throughout a given process. This will define how productivity is defined

when monitoring desktop activity.

• Process monitoring requires employees to start and stop time tracking

for each element of the process.

• Such a tracking structure is complex and time-consuming to build.

• The process triggers must be consistent, with every employee doing the

same work following the same process, and they have to activate their

time tracking consistently.

• This takes time to implement and to get teams acclimated to specific

processes and tracking requirements.

Productivity monitoring:

• Desktop monitoring is relatively easy to implement, with analytics

measuring productivity in terms of applications used and time spent

using them.

• Desktop analytics do not require employee interface or activation to

be effective, as monitoring is based on automatic application activity

tracking.

• Such productivity monitoring can be immediately useful, with information

quickly collected and analyzed for reporting purposes.

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The next stage is putting the collated and analyzed data to work.

“Our enterprise group found huge benefits once we started

getting the data to use it in our regular workforce management

processes,” a workforce manager told to the roundtable. The new

numbers were “transformative,” in that “we could see if resources

were lined up, if we had the right number of people, but also that

they were doing the right thing.”

With rich data from the back office, forecasting and scheduling

is more precise, taking into account expected work items and

their respective average handle times, as well as actual employee

availability. Scheduling adherence can also be tracked in real

time, in order to ensure maximum value from your workforce

management tools. It “changes the entire way you forecast and

schedule the relevant number of employees,” the manager added.

“And it gives them the authority to start managing their time,

managing their schedule.”

One participant told the roundtable about a dramatic example of

how improved activity monitoring has impacted their company’s

forecasting and scheduling. Once the company had detailed and

accurate back office performance data, workforce managers were

quite surprised to see that employee productivity fell significantly

during overtime hours. As a result, they started limiting or, in some

cases, eliminating overtime. In fact, it turned out to be more cost-

efficient and productive to hire additional staff for regular working

hours than to add overtime hours to current schedules.

Improved visibility into the back office and the resulting accurate

productivity measurements often reveal or confirm previously

undocumented phenomena, such as underperformance during

overtime. While this certainly improves forecasting and scheduling,

it can also provide insight into potentially faulty back office

processes.

Forecast and Schedule

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‘Moving the Needle’ on Performance

A corporate representative at the roundtable noted, “We found

loopholes where we weren’t getting the data we expected.” In

fact, it was found that performed activity was not being recorded

due to a missing timestamp, which is how the back office was

measuring activity. With that data, the workforce managers

were able to ask the IT team to identify what, if any, activity was

occurring during the periods of time that were unaccounted for.

Such a missing timestamp can be seen, for example, if there is no

movement by the employee on a given URL, even if he or she is

on the site for work purposes.

The workforce managers at the roundtable emphasized that

the process of implementing the NICE Back Office Workforce

Management solution helped them realize the true complexity of

a lot of their back office processes. This allowed them to leverage

the collected and analyzed data for improvements in their IT

systems processes.

Another aspect of performance that back

office workforce managers must address

is employee scheduling adherence. At

the roundtable, it was noted that NICE

representatives were initially surprised to

see how often organizations shift to focus

more on scheduling after they adopt

a back office workforce management

solution. The question was raised regarding

how this shift in culture was received by

employees.

In the case of salaried employees, one of

the enterprise managers noted, scheduled

hours may be less important, as their work

is more project-based. However, in the

case of hourly employees, naturally there

is a need to make sure they work their

scheduled hours and that those hours are

used most effectively to meet customer

need.

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In fact, real-time schedule adherence may seem counterintuitive

in a back office environment, as there is less immediacy to the

work items per employee. The focus is naturally more on schedule

conformance (i.e., total hours worked, but how you break up your

work day is more or less your business). Nonetheless, a workforce

manager noted, the application of real-time schedule adherence

monitoring provided the employees “goals they can meet and be

held accountable for” in terms of scheduling and performance

demands. It was the biggest gain seen so far, according to the

manager, with real-time adherence improving quickly by up to 75

percent and better attendance.

A workforce manager who was not currently using NICE’s real-time

schedule adherence monitoring tool explained to the roundtable

that a business management team looks at the historical data

and determines what percentage of time was productive. Then,

they look at outliers and advise those employees of their relative

performance.

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Back Office

Use Cases:From Greater Insight to a More Effective Workforce

Optum-UHG, which operates in the health

vertical, implemented the NICE Back

Office Proficiency Solution for workforce

management, including a real-time

analytics component.

After implementation, the company very

quickly saw results, including a 13%

improvement in back office schedule

adherence. Visibility provided the insight

needed into inconsistencies in processes,

as well as best practices, which have been

used to adapt and standardize effectively.

The company’s workforce operations manager explained that

the results were, in significant part, due to an insistence that both

managers and employees fully understood the new productivity

monitoring data. This meant focusing on obtaining immediately

useful data, using desktop tracking, and ensuring that the data

was understood. “It’s very important to work with the operational

team on understanding what we’re seeing,” the manager said,

“because the data is massive.” Then, it is possible to get buy-in

from the back office employees using the system, as well. Once

you have the supervisors and their team members on board, you

can start working on more complex process monitoring, including

offline work.

Regarding implementation, a current user of the NICE Back

Office Proficiency Solution recommended informing staff that

their desktops were being monitored and sharing the data with

them. “It’s amazing the amount of change that happened with us

just telling them that,” she added. In this case, non-productive

browsing immediately went from 5-8% of their activity to under

2%, due to self-policing. In addition, there was a natural increase

in productivity very shortly after they were made aware of the

application monitoring.

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However, it was noted that prior to informing the staff, it is

important to start with tracking current behavior to determine a

baseline for what is productive and what is not. In some cases,

sites employees are visiting will not be familiar to the workforce

managers and investigation will be needed to determine how

to categorize it. Optum created adherence reports based more

accurately on the computer use in actual practice, with new

activity codes, a changed procedural order, open (versus closed)

options, and many other changes.

Once the baseline was determined and the staff was informed of

the real-time monitoring, the Optum manager explained, there was

now a set of quantifiable goals that employees could be expected

to achieve, something which had not previously existed. Moreover,

as there were performance and structural improvements, the

company could continually adjust those goals and encourage

constant improvement.

By way of example, the Optum manager described a team of

employees the company had that would be used for both front

and back office work, alternating hours for each type of activity.

The workforce manager discovered,

thanks to the NICE Back Office Proficiency

Solution, that the team members were not

as productive as they could be due to the

time needed during each transition. “We

worked with the team to understand that,”

the manager said, “and refocus part of the

team exclusively on phones and part of the

team exclusively on the back office.”

Real-time monitoring has produced

another large effect for Optum - active

management of the back office teams,

such as an alert to a manager to reach

out to an employee who appears idle

for an excessive amount of time. In the

past, there would hardly have been any

interaction between managers and staff

unless there was an urgent question or a

periodic review.

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The Optum representative said that openness made the cultural

shift acceptable, understood and successful. This prompted

a question regarding an uptick in employee turnover after

implementation of the NICE Back Office Proficiency Solution. “We

saw attrition go up,” the Optum Workforce Manager confirmed,

“but we also saw productivity go up. So, maybe it was some good

attrition happening.” That is, the high performers remained and

continue to perform well, while low performers have perhaps been

weeded out.

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The telecommunications company

Verizon implemented the NICE Back

Office Proficiency Solution, but without

real-time analytics. With a greater focus

on the process, they saw dramatic

productivity improvement within five

months.

The collated and analyzed back office

activity data identified process failures

due to teams not taking the correct

actions. A large volume of uncategorized

activity could be categorized, for

example, and the actual length of given

processes could be determined.

These data and results were shared with the relevant directors.

Upon seeing the numbers, the Verizon representative noted,

each director was convinced to quickly adopt the NICE

solution. This acceptance produced more analytics and the

system could be rolled out to the next group with yet more

persuasive data.

“Visibility was key,” said the Verizon Back Office Workforce

Manager. Feeding the analyzed data back to the management

groups created the momentum needed for the rapid

improvements Verizon experienced.

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Summary

Steps in the right solution

Lessons learned

Last words

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1. Roll-out is always key to the success of a workforce

management implementation. A lot of time was spent with

the back office supervisors on the data, to ensure clarity of

understanding and usefulness.

2. New adherence reports for the back office were based on

actual computer work.

3. Employee teams were reorganized to focus on specific types of

work, such as the phone queue, back office and escalations.

4. The new solution was focused on increasing productive time,

and reducing idle, locked and non-productive time.

5. The data brought higher visibility to the link between back office

backlog and call volumes.

6. Employee goals were adjusted based on data collected,

encouraging improvement.

Steps in theRight Direction

1. Even if something is pushed through by senior leadership, you

must have frontline buy-in.

2. You must understand what you are seeing before you share the

results. You can track anything, so it has to be carefully calibrated

and categorized to provide actionable and clear data.

3. When a team is under pressure, they are not open to change

unless it is easy. Part of that is making it visually clear in presenting

the data, using graphs, etc.

4. Sometimes it is better to focus staff on what they do best,

rather than blending types of work.

5. Back office data is massive, so focus on making small

improvements.

LessonsLearned

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• Visibility is a goal, but you maintain

your credibility by making sure the

collected data is understood before

sharing it.

• Don’t let your current reports limit

you. That is, be sure your reports

are covering data that is actually

actionable – fine-grained or

generalized, as needed.

LastWords

Back to contents >>