When it comes to staffing requirements and operational performance goals, every organization is vastly different. Ensuring you have the proper number and types of employees scheduled to manage your back office at any given time can be a challenge, especially if you have little to no visibility into what you needed yesterday, last week, or last season to use as a basis for forecasting. It is easy to see how enterprise workforce management (EWM) solutions and back office staff scheduling improve operations, make performance tracking easier, and help companies improve the customer experience in the front office. However, the customer experience does not stop with the contact center. It extends to encompass the business processes that take place in the back office – processes like loan administration, claims processing, and finance.
To improve quality, enhance customer experience, increase operating efficiency, lift productivity and reduce attrition, it is critical for companies to be able to properly forecast and schedule back office employees, track their adherence in real time, and streamline the workflow between the front and back office.
Challenges of Enterprise Workforce Management and Back Office Staff Scheduling
As new technology becomes available and organizations implement solutions hoping to solve business challenges, they end up with a loosely integrated group of disparate systems. In an environment where each element was not designed to work with the others, many challenges arise, including high costs, technology and staffing inefficiencies, poor performance quality, and most importantly, no real-time view into adherence.
Furthermore, the lack of an expert technology partner to help you manage a centralized or dispersed workforce with varied skills presents hurdles to assessing, comparing, and improving back office performance.
Pipkins Enterprise Workforce Management Handles Back Office Staff Scheduling
Forecasting and scheduling is the central nervous system of your enterprise. With Pipkins, using screen capture to generate average handle time (AHT) data for back office functions, EWM now becomes forecastable. With realtime adherence analytics available by individual or key performance indicator (KPI), it is easy for managers and supervisors to see how the organization is performing against set targets and goals. Pipkins automates manual processes, integrates data collected from employee desktops, improves forecast accuracy, enables managers to view and manage resource capacity, and empowers employees to improve their own performance. Back office staff scheduling has never been easier.
Workforce Management
Pipkins Workforce Management features a number of key functions to improve forecast accuracy and streamline planning, while enabling supervisors to monitor real-time employee activities, and properly view and manage resource capacity, including:
- Integrating with desktop process management software to automatically calculate average handle time, making this forecastable data
- Accurately calculating the number of employees needed to process work items in single and multi-site environments
- Supporting any scheduling environment and optimizing task assignments
- Utilizing sophisticated algorithms to create schedules that ensure the right
- number of employees are scheduled to handle the predicted workload based on
service level goals
With Pipkins Workforce Management for the back office staff scheduling, you can:
- Reduce administrative time and increase supervisor productivity by automating and streamlining manual tasks associated with forecasting and managing
resource capacity - Manage resources more effectively and reduce costs associated with overtime and overstaffing by improving forecast accuracy
- Increase employee satisfaction and reduce attrition by empowering employees to self-manage scheduling and time-off requests
- Improve employee productivity by leveraging comprehensive data for assessing performance, identifying skill gaps, and measuring improvement
- Improve customer satisfaction by streamlining back office tasks like application approval, claims processing and order fulfillment
Performance Management
Pipkins Performance Management features a number of key capabilities to help improve your capacity for strategic planning, provide visibility into operational performance results against objectives, gain insight into specific areas that require extra focus and ensure your back office performance is aligned with overall corporate objectives, including:
- Screen and configure data capture enables you to associate an AHT with various tasks and types of Interactions
- Built-in KPIs and metrics to assess individual, department and business performance
- Scorecards for back-office employees to view their current and past performance
- Performance dashboards for at-a-glance views of performance with drill-down capabilities by employee or KPI
- Reporting that can be customized for managers, supervisors and executives
With Pipkins Performance Management for the back office, you can:
- Forecast staffing using AHT data based on total interaction time, including screens and keystrokes
- Track how employees are sticking to schedules and working toward achieving objectives by monitoring schedule adherence in real time
- Make smarter decisions about staffing based on real-time, actionable performance analytics
- Aggregate a complete view of all performance data in a single database that can be tied to the contact center
- Improve employee performance by enabling them to address skill gaps and improve performance on their own
- Increase efficiency and reduce costs by automating routine tasks and reporting on performance hourly, daily, weekly for any internal audience
Your customer experience starts with properly forecasting and scheduling back office employees. Creating a great customer experience is made possible through both front
and back office activities, ensuring optimal performance from employees, and streamlining the workflow between the front and back office.
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. Vantage Point, Pipkins’ premier product, is the most accurate forecasting and scheduling tool on the market. Pipkins’ systems forecast and schedule more than 300,000 agents in over 500 locations across all industries worldwide.