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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
32
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
54
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.
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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 >>
9
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
2524
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
2928
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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3938
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
5150
• 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
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