Recently, Verint customer, John Barker, Managing Director at Capita, a large UK business process outsourcer, shared his story at Verint Virtual. As part of his session, From -11 NPS to +79 NPS: The Back-Office Gets It Done with Work Manager!, he made three recommendations for organizations managing a remote/work-from-home workforce.
- Simplify your end-to-end processes and reduce the number of handoffs between colleagues.
- Measure people on the outcomes which they deliver rather than presentee-ism or hours spent “in the office.”
- Create a virtual operational management framework including a daily mission control.
John speaks from experience, having managed front- and back-office operations for more than 15 years, and the account of a large UK Insurer for the past 5 years. Historically, the team managed more than 2,600 customer processes and 1,000 colleagues across four sites in the UK and India. These colleagues spanned both contact center and back-office.
Processes were fragmented across teams and sites, and the lack of visibility impacted their ability to understand where improvements could be made. The average end-to-end customer experience took 35 days from initial request (contact center) to fulfillment (back office). As you can imagine, customers were not happy, which led to negative Net Promoter Score (NPS).
Capita took swift action and implemented Verint Work Manager to capture all touchpoints of work items, all process steps—and by whom and how the work was processed. With this new insight, they were able to modernize and transform their service operations.
Simplify Processes
One challenge Capita had was that the inherited processes were paper based. The real-time data provided by Work Manager informed philosophy changes required, including the removal of paper and use of online verification tools and other technology enablers. Capita redesigned their processes to eliminate paper and reduce the number of customer touch points.
As a result, they went from over 2,600 functional and fragmented processes to exactly 250 end-to-end customer-oriented processes, fulfilling 80% of customer demands at the first point of contact, and the remaining 20% fulfilled within 3 business days.
When moving work between locations and colleagues, whether in the office or remote, the simpler the process and the fewer the handoffs the better. This takes time, but the payoff is well worth it. In one group Capita moved their NPS from – 11 to +79 in just 8 months. This work was done prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, but contributed greatly to Capita’s ability to quickly adapt and respond to the crisis.
Read the Capita case study.
Measure Outcomes vs. Hours “In Office”
When dealing with a newly remote, work-from-home workforce, many organizations focus on making sure employees are working their assigned schedules. John recommends worrying less about what time Jane clocked in and out, and more on the customer and client outcomes which she delivered.
Did she hit her production goals for the day? Note production goals should factor in handle time for each work type—so complexity, variations and time to complete are calculated into employee production goals. This creates a more equitable assessment of goal achievement across teams and sites that may be working on different tasks—and promotes autonomy, trust and flexibility for colleagues, which is intended to support improvements in colleague welfare.
Create a Mission Control
Similar to NASA’s Mission Control, front and back-office operations need a central hub that provides full visibility into all the data related to the work, people and processes, regardless of location. Verint Work Manager provides a dashboard for all work and resources. Leaders can, at a glance, see how they are performing against their production and customer outcome-based SLA goals, and proactively adjust resources and assignments should there be a peak or dip in work volumes—or an outage at a location, or unreliable connectivity in a region.
When the Covid-19 pandemic began, this particular account in Capita had only 5% of colleagues working from home. After Covid-19, 97% of its workforce transitioned to work from home. Their UK agents were fielding 100% of customer calls from home and all back office customer demands were being fulfilled in a timely manner.
With Work Manager they were able to balance workloads across sites and resources so that service and SLA achievement were barely impacted by the transition.
To hear more about Capita’s story, watch the Verint Virtual presentation, From -11 NPS to +79 NPS: The Back-Office Gets It Done with Work Manager!
For Related Content
Let’s Humanize Back-Office Operations
Focus Your Back Office on the Customer vs. the Transaction
Verint Virtual On-Demand Session: Operations Visualizer: Creating & Sustaining Back Office Operational Excellence
Article from Sr. Solutions Marketing Manager Mary Lou Joseph, Verint.
Group Elite is a Verint Strategic Partner. This blog was originally posted on Verint’s website.
