Customer expectations are skyrocketing, challenging organizations to deliver outstanding service.
Yet, many companies find themselves grappling with the demands, leading to dissatisfaction among consumers. A significant source of this discontent stems from back-office departments like claims, accounting, and IT services, where processes and communications often fall short.
This disconnect makes it challenging for frontline agents to effectively assist customers, resulting in frustration on both ends.
Interactions that involve a customer service agent, such as a loan application or service request, often trigger follow-up actions with other departments.
However, these tasks can get lost in a black hole due to siloed systems, manual workarounds, and the inability to track tasks across departments.
Consequently, organizations struggle to classify and prioritize work, measure employee utilization, balance workloads, and plan resources, leading to missed deadlines, errors, and work backlogs.
While many organizations have made strides in modernizing their contact center infrastructures, there are still significant opportunities to enhance back-office functions.
In this article, we’ll delve into the landscape of back-office technologies and explore how new cloud contact center capabilities can help enterprises bridge the gap between the front and back office, enabling more effective customer-related tasks and follow-ups — ultimately leading to an enhanced customer experience.
Unveiling the Reality of Back-Office Technologies
Let’s dissect the components involved in a typical customer service request.
A work item or task encompasses any customer request submitted within or outside a contact center interaction, such as a support ticket, claim, billing inquiry, or sales/marketing lead.
These tasks often have associated service-level agreements (SLAs) and can be fully unattended, agent-assisted, or a combination of both.
Key Back-Office Technologies in Focus
Business Process Management Systems (BPM): BPM systems facilitate the integration and automation of back-office processing by connecting disparate systems. However, they often lack contact center capabilities.
Contact Center Software: Contact center software offers visibility and accountability for interactions across multiple channels but may lose visibility after interactions are closed.
Desktop Analytics: Desktop analytics enable contact center managers to comprehend employee screen activities during customer interactions, effectively managing large operations across diverse geographies.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA): RPA accelerates process completion by automating repetitive tasks but has limited scope.
AI Assistants: AI assistants are able to automate more complex tasks, such as making decisions based on data like, generate leads, collect feedback, verify customers before providing details, identify, and learn and share customer analytics to improve sales and services.
They are able to learn from data and adapt to changing conditions to provide 24×7 self-service.
The Challenge of Siloed Infrastructure
Despite the availability of various technologies, the siloed approach — where each piece of the process is handled through different systems — poses challenges.
This fragmented approach hinders timely solutions, particularly as processes become more complex.
Bridging Silos with Work Automation and Task Routing
Work automation and task routing capabilities offered by platforms like Turabit AI integrates with siloed systems, such as Salesforce and ServiceNow. This integration involves four phases:
Data Training: Training all your data on the website and on premises.
Workflow Automation: Prioritizing and establishing business flows by applying business rules for individual teams and department.
Analyze: Increasing operational efficiency with end-to-end visibility into services and processes at one place and at one dashboard.
Automation and Intelligent Routing: Routing tasks to skilled and available resources, ensuring timely responses and maintaining workload balance.
Unlocking the Benefits of Work Automation and Task Routing
These capabilities offer numerous business benefits, including meeting SLAs, increasing operational efficiency, ensuring fair workload distribution, and improving customer experience through end-to-end workflow automation.
Contact center agents gain a consolidated view of all their work, empowering them to make informed decisions in real-time and enhancing their performance.
Conclusion
While the distinction between customer service and back-office technologies is evident, their interdependence is undeniable.
By leveraging work automation and task routing capabilities, organizations can bridge the gap between the front and back office, delivering effective and consistent customer experiences across industries.
Discover how work automation and task routing can help you build customer loyalty with timely, effective responses across departments, systems, and channels.
Schedule a demo today