Bridging the Front and Back Office Divide: AI’s Role in Unifying Workflows and Improving the Customer Journey
By Donna Fluss
Enterprises have structured operating departments the same way for decades: they establish functions responsible for specific business activities, assign budgets, create workflows to manage tasks and activities, implement the necessary systems, staff the operations, and go into production to perform their unique work. Most of these departments have been in place since they were created as it’s common practice for an organization to add a function when new business activities emerge, but it’s rare for them to close or merge existing departments.
This approach has worked for a long time, and few want to disrupt the status quo. However, artificial intelligence (AI) and smart automation (also known as robotic process automation) are transforming existing operations so significantly that it should no longer be business as usual. Companies today have a unique opportunity to reimagine how they manage work within and between departments. This is not about doing the same tasks in smarter ways; instead, it is a chance to eliminate unnecessary functions and activities and automate tasks that do not require the complex reasoning capabilities of human employees. Some will consider this approach risky as it shakes up many aspects of enterprise operations. Still, it’s a strategic necessity for businesses that want to survive and thrive during the next decade. And it’s a must for any enterprise working to improve the customer journey, enhance the employee experience (EX), and increase their bottom line.
A highly opportunistic place to start is by combining the traditional front- and back-office operating departments. Contact centers (initially called phone centers) came into existence in the early 1980s to help companies realize economies of scale and efficiencies in handling customer inquiries by separating front-office (customer-facing) and back-office (transaction/paperwork) activities. The idea was to have a group of employees dedicated to answering calls to make it easier, quicker, and more cost-effective for customers to reach the organization and ask for help. Front-office employees, later known as agents, wrote up customer requests or input them into a system and sent them to another group of employees, referred to as back-office employees. These resources performed manual research, resolved inquiries, or completed the transactions requested by the front office. This approach, while very outdated today, improved productivity and operational efficiency and was a good approach at the time.
Now, contact center agents have real-time guidance solutions or virtual assistants that identify the correct procedures in the moment and lead them through processes, and knowledge management applications that deliver the appropriate information/policies/procedures to communicate to customers, customer relationship management (CRM) solutions that automatically process the work, and automated post-interaction summarization that generates a synopsis of each interaction seconds after it’s completed. Conversation analytics, powered by generative AI (GenAI), is an essential enabler of all these activities, with a lot more expected to come to market in the next year.
Companies are also starting to use agentic AI to complete activities that required human involvement in the past. And more functions and tasks are being automated with each passing day, as intelligent and workflow-based systems can complete more items, either with help from their human counterparts or on their own.
Given this level of intelligence and automation, it’s time to combine front and back-office departments to improve the customer experience (CX), EX, and bottom line. Front-office employees can fully resolve a much greater percentage of customer inquiries/interactions in real-time, although doing so may increase average handle time. However, if adding 30 – 120 seconds to the front end saves companies five to 15 minutes of back-end work following an interaction—while reducing processing delays, enhancing quality, eliminating low-value work, and increasing first-contact resolution—it’s worth the risk of shaking up well-established enterprise organizations and workflows.
Bottom Line
Customer expectations for a good service experience have changed, and companies need to enhance their operating environments to meet their increasingly demanding needs. What worked in the past may not be the
optimal approach for the future, as is the case for having separate front and back-office functions. DMG recommends that companies reassess their servicing functions and use AI and intelligent automation to enable them to transform, simplify, and improve both their customer and employee experience. If you’d like assistance in making this happen, please reach out to us. We can help.
Donna Fluss, Founder and President of DMG Consulting LLC, provides a unique and unparalleled understanding of AI, people, processes, and technology that drive the strategic direction and performance of the dynamic and rapidly transforming contact center and back-office operations and markets. Donna can be reached at donna.fluss@dmgconsult.com.
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