Do You Trust the Quality of Your Back-office Performance Data?

Mary Lou Joseph February 20, 2023

A 2022 survey of 500 data professionals showed that 77% have issues with data quality and 91% said it’s impacting their company’s performance.¹The quality of data is usually measured by how complete, consistent, valid, timely and unique the data is.

High-quality data, especially when it comes to measuring and managing performance in back-office operations, is hard to come by. Back offices often have multiple legacy processing systems from which it is difficult to integrate or extract data. These areas also use other common tools for managing work and tasks, such as CRM, email—and may even still have faxes and manual paper processing work.

Even with all the great leaps in technical innovation, you will still find people using Excel to try and bring the data together. Most of the time they only succeed in creating a partial picture of their operations at a specific point in time. This makes it difficult for managers and directors to get a cross-organizational view because everyone has a different spreadsheet for collecting and analyzing data. Does this sound familiar?

What Back-Office Leaders Want

Back-office leaders agree that a single source of operational truth, one source that managers and employees can agree is valid, relevant, timely, and trusted, would be a game changer for planning for and measuring employee performance.

Without this comprehensive, trusted source of data, people spend a lot of time arguing about the validity of numbers, the impact of a challenge or opportunity, and the cause of issues and/or breaks in processes.

And incomplete data is creating blind spots, eroding the productivity and effectiveness of resources, and literally leaving capacity on the table.

Desktop Activity Data Fills the Data Gap

The following two case studies demonstrate how organizations across various industries were able to create a single source of operational truth and standardized framework to measure performance and improve operational agility and effectiveness.

These organizations both had processing systems that could give them partial data on work types and volumes. They could capture processing times for many—but not all—process steps. In addition, the different teams were using different systems and metrics, making roll-up reporting difficult, inconsistent, and often outdated by the time the reporting was compiled.

These organizations added employee desktop activity data to supplement their existing systems reporting and fill many of the data gaps in their operational areas. Here are their stories.

An HR Services Outsourcer

An HR services outsourcer was struggling with managing seasonal peaks. With inefficient data on volumes and resource availability, they relied on overtime and temporary help to manage demand. The outsourcer wanted the agility to move resources between the contact center and back-office as customer demand fluctuated.

However, in order to share resources, it needed a single source of data to get insight into the types and volume of work being handled, forecasted demand and true capacity needs. A true visionary, the HR outsourcer was moving toward a One Workforce strategy even before the term and practice were introduced.

They implemented Verint Workforce Management (WFM) across functions which increased accuracy and enabled the company to handle a larger amount of work items for their clients’ customers with the same number of people – saving one of the outsourcer’s clients $100,000.

Verint Performance Management scorecards, part of the WFM solution, enabled them to effectively measure front- and back-office productivity, even if an individual switched between functions. It allowed them to redeploy resources based on what the true needs of the work were—and still track key measures such as quality, adherence, productivity and customer survey scores.

The outsourcer itself saved $300,000 in overtime in the first year and, as a side benefit, was able to generate cost-to-serve reporting by customer and product line.

A Global P&C Insurer

A large insurance company sought to create a global, standardized performance management framework and consistent metrics to help it break down silos between its many companies, functions and locations.

The insurer also turned to the employee desktop as the source of trusted data and implemented Verint Desktop and Process Analytics and Performance Management. The insurer experienced greater processing consistency and productivity.

Specifically, they saw a 36 percent increase in time spent in production applications—and a dramatic decrease in time spent on non-production-related activities, saving them millions of dollars.

Trusted Data Enables a One Workforce Approach

Ultimately, the HR outsourcer, insurance company, and numerous other organizations have chosen the employee desktop as the trusted source of data for their operational and employee performance management reporting. The standardized performance management framework across functions provides management and employees with the data, tools and disciplines needed to: