The Business Processing Outsourcing (BPO) back office has been through significant changes in recent years, including the push and pull of offshoring and onshoring. As the UK economy enters a more positive growth phase, what’s next for the back office?
Business intelligence
Real time workforce management technology, which provides detailed business intelligence, is set to revolutionise the back office and the relationship between outsourcing providers and their clients.
Using workforce management technology that gathers data from the back office shows BPO companies precisely how many minutes each task takes to administrate and in turn, provides senior management with access to a bird’s-eye view of their business. This accurate and timely view of real cost-of-service provision is critical to an outsourcer maintaining profitability and knowing when not to take on new business at an unprofitable level.
In an industry with such tight profit margins, this is invaluable business intelligence that can help BPOs recognise which books of business are most profitable and which areas of the business are most efficient, therefore enabling them to better predict the performance of their business in the future.
A new way of working
Back office employees are working away, but does the operations director really know exactly where time is being spent? The right tools can show them where a special focus is needed to administrate certain products, to meet Service Level Agreements, and where additional skills are needed to deliver on a specific task, as well as who has the right training to complete these tasks to a high-level standard.
By distinguishing where each individual back office employee’s skills are being used, workforce management systems can allocate tasks automatically and identify from Quality Assurance systems where the correct level of training and development is necessary. This level of granularity can make the back office more productive and efficient, leading to a behavioural and cultural shift in the company so that administration agent and management time and investment is utilised in the most effective way possible. As an example, adopting this ‘factory floor’ approach to task allocation has led to a 15 per cent increase in the number of transactions processed per person at insurance outsourcer HCL IBS.
A linchpin for the whole business
Workforce management software has the power – both as a business intelligence tool for more accurate costing, and as an operational tool for more efficient processing – to improve productivity and spark a real cultural change in outsourcing organisations.
Having greater governance not only provides companies with real-time information about their business, but also enables a more cohesive, linear handling of work allocation, which will ultimately result in better return on investment (ROI). Workforce management acts as a linchpin between outsourcers’ front and back offices – both off and onshore – to provide better products and services for their clients.