How Back-Office Operations Can Sabotage Your CX Strategy

Last week was Customer Service Week! A great time to celebrate customer advocacy and happiness. Organizations are investing in customer experience-enhancing solutions and improving customer interactions.

But did you know that, according to research from Aberdeen, 17% of customer dissatisfaction calls into the contact center are because of issues in the back office?¹ It is unfortunate because these poor customer experiences impact brand reputation, are counterproductive to contact center CX initiatives, and are entirely avoidable.

It’s not just about missing a promised turnaround time or poor quality of work. Maya Angelou perfectly encapsulates why it matters to your customers:

“… people will never forget how you made them feel.”

Challenges in the back office can increase customer stress and frustration, potentially magnifying an already difficult situation. For example, not all workers get paid when out of work due to illness. Critical and long-term hospitalizations can drastically reduce household income. Financial insecurity amplifies their dependents’ stress.

If the worker’s disability claim has missed the service level agreement, resolving it requires dependents to engage with the contact center repeatedly. It is an unnecessary burden on top of the stress they are already experiencing.

But it’s not just the heartbreaking situations; it’s also the everyday experiences:

• People dependent on getting medication by mail are impacted when the back-office sends the wrong medication or is late in sending it. Not only does it create frustration, but it also conveys to the customer a lack of regard for their well-being.

• If a bank’s back-office misses sending out a new debit card, it can potentially create an embarrassing situation in a checkout line when an expired card is declined.

Those dissatisfied customers will still contact your organization no matter how much you invest in your contact center CX. These calls can be avoided by adding workforce management to your back-office.

Workforce Management simplifies the complexity of managing the people and the work by planning for the right skilled people available at the right time. It also helps drive operational efficiency and effectiveness by measuring and managing employee performance to help ensure the right work gets done, at the right pace, the first time.

Having happy and loyal customers isn’t just about making a customer interaction on the front end stellar. The entire, end-to-end customer journey needs to be optimized—that includes your back-office operations.

Learn more about the impact back-office has on CX, and how you can improve operational performance to meet your service and quality goals by visiting www.verint.com/backoffice.

¹ Start Improving CC Results By Focusing On Your Back Office, Aberdeen, 2019