Back Office WFM technology Can Fine-Tune Operational Efficiencies to Boost Performance

Mortgage companies can and do vary greatly when it comes to operational performance goals and staffing requirements. You need to determine the correct number of workers with the correct skill sets that are necessary to handle the incoming workload to meet your performance goals. You need workforce management. You need back office WFM technology.

Commercial mortgage brokers and originators who seek to boost the efficiency and effectiveness of their back office can benefit from the gains made in enterprise workforce management and their impact on back office WFM technology. The solutions offered today can enhance efficiency, aid in performance tracking and contribute to improved customer experience when interacting with your front office personnel. In particular, this hold true for those mortgage brokerages lacking visibility into what they needed yesterday, last week, last month, last quarter or last year. Historical information about workloads and staffing levels provide valuable insights  and assist with accurate forecasting and staff scheduling.

Customer experience isn’t strictly limited to the contact center or front office. It is also impacted by business processes that occur in the back office, some of which include application processing, business administration and decision making.

Those commercial mortgage companies that adopt the tools and processes to accurately forecast workloads and efficiently schedule back office staff to handle that work can expect to see improvements in the following areas:

• Enhanced customer experience
• Improved operational efficiency
• Higher productivity
• Lower attrition rates

In addition, it is vital to monitor and track adherence, preferably in real time, and to streamline the workflow between your contact center and back office operations. With the use of back office WFM technology makes these goals are easily attained.

Automation & Integration

You can think of forecasting and scheduling as the central nervous system of your business or organization, and enterprise workforce management (or more specifically back office WFM technology) as the brain that keeps everything running smoothly.

You can think of forecasting and scheduling as the central nervous system of your business or organization, and enterprise workforce management (or more specifically back office WFM technology) as the brain that keeps everything running smoothly.  Back office WFM technology, like all workforce management software solutions, can automate many time-consuming manual processes, integrate data collected from the computers at employee workstations, improve forecasting accuracy, allow managers view and adjust resource capacity. Plus, these tools can also empower your staff to improve their own performance.

Effective performance management tools enables executive leadership to:

• Monitor how well workers follow schedules and work toward achieving objectives
• Make more informed decisions about staffing levels
• Aggregate and store all related performance data in a single database
• Address employee skill gaps to to elevate performance
• Lower costs and improve efficiency by automating routine tasks
• Track and monitoring performance metrics as needed (hourly, daily, weekly, etc.)

For example, screen capture can be used to generate average handle time data for certain back office functions like document review or application processing so you can have more accurate data to use in your forecasting for future/ongoing needs. This data may also assist you in refining processes and procedures, and streamlining workflow.

With real-time analytics, management at all levels can see the performance of individual workers, teams and the overall organization versus their established targets and goals.  This performance data can be viewed for each employee or viewed by key performance indicators (KPIs). However, keep this in mind: when new technology enters the market, many companies embrace multiple solutions in an effort to address multiple issues simultaneously. Instead, the end result is often a collection of loosely integrated disparate systems that don’t work particularly well together. This in turn creates new challenges and drive up costs. You need to partner with a technology expert to avoid pitfalls such as technology and staffing inefficiencies, weak performance quality and lack of real-time data. All can prove troublesome.

Key Functions

Key functions of enterprise workforce management and back office WFM technology include:

• Calculating average handle times automatically though integrations with desktop process management software.
• Scheduling support.
• Task assignment optimization.
• The ability to create optimized schedules using advanced algorithms to ensure the right number of workers are on the job to handle the expected amount of work in an appropriate amount of time to achieve the organization’s service-level goals and be able to do so both in single- and multi-site environments.

In addition, back-office WFM enables you to do the following:

• Raise supervisor productivity and reduce admin. hours through streamlining and automating processes associated with forecasting and resource capacity management.
• Improve the management of labor and other resources to control costs related to overtime and over-staffing through increased forecasting accuracy.
• Boost employee satisfaction levels and lower turnover rates by empowering your staff to self-manage work schedules, vacation planning and other time-off requests.
• Increase agent productivity through use of comprehensive data to evaluate performance, identify skill gaps and measure improvement.
• Improve customer satisfaction ratings through streamlining and accelerating the performance of back-office functions like application approval, claims processing, order fulfillment, etc..

Performance Optimization

When evaluating tech tools to enhance back-office efficiency and bolster your strategic planning ability, look for the following:

• Data collection which associates average handle times (AHTs) with specific tasks and interaction types.
• Metrics and performance indicators that assess individual, team, department and overall business performance.
• Scorecards that measure current performance against past performance.
• Performance dashboards that offer quick reviews and deeper dives through drill-downs.
• Reporting tools that can generate customized reports for supervisors, managers and executives.

Exceptional customer experience results from a combination of front- and back-office interactions and activities. It’s true in the mortgage industry and many other verticals. To achieve and maintain optimal performance levels, your operations require fine-tuning over time. When used effectively, enterprise workforce management and back office WFM technology in particular can help keep your systems, procedures and people on track and working efficiently and effectively.

About Pipkins

Pipkins, Inc. is a leading supplier of workforce management software and services to the call center industry. For the past twenty-eight years, Pipkins has created and delivered superior workforce management products for call centers of all sizes with thirteen industry-first applications. WorkforceScheduling.com, powered by Pipkins’ premier product Vantage Point, the most accurate forecasting and scheduling tool on the market, provides a hosted, low cost, subscription-based, solution for managing call center workforce with feature rich and expandable solutions. Pipkins’ systems forecast and schedule more than 300,000 agents in over 500 locations across all industries worldwide.