Back Office Virtual Roundtable 2016

Transcription

1 Back Office Virtual Roundtable 2016 About NICE NICE (Nasdaq: NICE) is the worldwide leading provider of both cloud and on-premise enterprise software solutions that empower organizations to make smarter decisions based on advanced analytics of structured and unstructured data. NICE helps organizations of all sizes deliver better customer service, ensure compliance, combat fraud and safeguard citizens. Over 22,000 organizations in more than 150 countries, including over 80 of the Fortune 100 companies, are using NICE solutions. Workforce Optimization in the Back Office

2 Table of Contents Overview...4 Who Was There?...6 Bringing Front Office Workforce Management Into the Back Office...8 What is Happening in Today s Back Office: Some Trends...12 Key Back Office Challenges: You Can t Measure What You Can t See...18 Back Office Workforce Management: The Proficiency Solution...26 Back Office Use Cases: From Greater Insight to a More Effective Workforce...40 Summary

3 Overveiw On the 27th of September, NICE Systems brought together around 30 participants for a multinational roundtable meeting to discuss the application of workforce management principles, techniques and technologies in the corporate back office. Participants highlighted the specific challenges commonly faced in increasing visibility into back office productivity, as well as the significant advantages that can quickly be gained for improved processes and employee schedule adherence. The topics covered were: Back Office WFM vs. Contact Center WFM Back Office trends Back Office challenges Back Office use cases (Optum and Verizon) Lessons learned The discussion was led by NICE Back Office solutions experts, as well as workforce managers with Optum-UHG and Verizon Enterprise. Back to contents >> 42 35

4 Who Was There? Optum, owned by the UnitedHealth Group, is a health services and innovation company with 150 locations worldwide. Using advanced technology, management services and data analytics, Optum focuses on modernizing infrastructure, advancing care and empowering consumers. Optum uses workforce management solutions both in house and on behalf of their clients. Walmart is a leading American multinational retail corporation that operates a chain of hypermarkets, discount department stores and grocery stores in 28 countries. As of 2016, it is the world s largest company by revenue and the largest private employer in the world, with 2.2 million employees. Verizon Enterprise Solutions is a division of Verizon Communications, a broadband telecommunications company and one of the largest American wireless communications service providers. Verizon Enterprise provides back office services and products for Verizon s business and government clients around the world. State Farm is an American group of insurance and financial services companies in the United States, with several wholly owned subsidiaries throughout the United States. Back to contents >> 6 7

5 Bringing Front Office Workforce Management Into the Back Office Even with extensive experience managing personnel, schedules and forecasting in the contact center, enterprises found it difficult to translate that knowledge into effective back office workforce management. Whereas in a contact center you have visibility literally down to the second, this is often not true in the back office. The differences between workforce management in the back office and in the front office surely start with visibility, as the NICE representatives noted, but they do not end there. 9

6 In the Contact Center: In the Back Office: There is high visibility into employee productivity. Forecasting focuses on immediate needs. Employee schedules are determined by contact volumes per interval. There is intraday tracking of service levels and abandon rates. The operational terminology emphasizes: contacts, abandons, agents. Historical data, such as average handle times, can be gleaned from automated call distribution tracking. There is low visibility into employee productivity. Forecasting requires taking into account deferrable and multi-step work. There is more of a focus on the type of work each employee does than on start/stop times. Intraday tracking notes service levels and backlogs. The operational terminology emphasizes: work items, backlog, employees. Historical data has to be collected from multiple systems, generally without reference to average handle times. Back to contents >> 10 11

7 What is Happening in Today s Back Office: Some Trends Questions of visibility and productivity monitoring in the back office are becoming more important, as companies are looking into the role of the back office in improving overall performance. This is related to three current trends in the serviceoriented industries: numbers, flexibility, and automation. Numbers Flexibility Automation 12 13

8 For the most part, they are discovering office workforce participants in the their company may management roundtable said have more people maturity, in that their organizations than expected the more data you confirmed or doing back office collect, the more exceeded the work and they can you see. The more above ratio of easily see how the you can see, the back to front office numbers might better you can Numbers There are far more back office workers than front office workers, on a percentage basis, in many developed countries, according to research by DMG Consulting. In the United States, for example, DMG found that there are an estimated personnel, with some citing 3:1, 4:1, or even 5:1. Even those noting a ratio closer to 2:1 added that, as real data is being collected currently, reach 2.5:1 or even higher. This reflected a general understanding that the observed numbers may reflect back manage employee schedules and forecast accordingly to maximize your back office potential. 2.5 times the number of back office employees as front office employees (cited in DMG s February 2016 WFM Report)

9 Flexibility Automation The Society of Workforce Planning Professionals found, based on a session survey during their annual conference in 2016, that sharing work between front and back offices is relatively common. However, this makes measuring productivity very difficult. Workforce managers know precisely what an employee is doing in the front office, but they have generally had no way to continue measuring productivity when the employee moved into the back office to cover work there. NICE was already observing this problem often among its clients several years ago, which guided the design of its back office solution. With the progress of technology, companies are moving toward greater automation of many processes. In the back office, according to data collected from NICE Systems customers, this is manifesting itself in a growing tendency toward automated prioritization and distribution of work to the appropriate teams within an organization. Back to contents >> 16 17

10 Key Back Office Challenges You Can t Measure What You Can t See Visibility Measurement Complexity All of us have sat in call centers and wondered, What are those people doing over there? They don t look like they re really working, observed the Optum workforce operations manager, by way of introducing the challenges of back office workforce management. Couldn t we use them? We have calls holding. Then we find out they re really working on something. But how do we track that and predict to that level? 18 19

11 Visibility While a large part of the business of an enterprise-scale organization takes place in the back office, visibility into workforce performance there is very often extremely limited. In part, this is due to the nature of the work, with virtual or physical paperwork alongside the use of online and offline desktop applications used in deferrable processes. This makes it difficult to track, which imposes limitations on performance improvement efforts. As the Optum workforce operations manager at the roundtable observed succinctly, You can t measure what you can t see. You can t control it and you can t make it work better. As a result, back office employees are often given carte blanche to do what they need to do, when they need to do it. This can include entering their own working times in payroll, even though there is no way to objectively track actual working hours or if their time was spent on truly job-related activities. This is a growing challenge today, as there are more and more work-at-home employees without immediate supervisor oversight. The weaknesses of such self-governed time studies or reporting pose a problem not just due to potential dishonesty; rather, as noted by a roundtable participant, the large number of back office tasks per work type creates a growing risk of human error and omission. Therefore, the most effective system would quantify and measure time spent on each task, without dependence on input directly from the employee. This provides a better infrastructure right from the foundation to create a better capacity model, and then a system that s driven more on trust naturally, rather than just on inputs by your team members

12 Measurement Part of the reason schedule adherence or levels of productivity are not measured in the back office is the challenge of defining what exactly to measure and how to measure it. Enterprise representatives at the roundtable noted that manual time studies are sometimes performed to determine the amount of time it takes to complete work items, but such studies do not drill down to look at the specific constituent tasks involved. Often, such studies are primitive and outdated and becoming more so as technology and processes change as well as lacking in follow-up studies to note the effects of changes implemented based on their results. The result can be back office teams with significant backlogs and phone queues, which fall far below defined service level goals. In one case mentioned at the roundtable, the implementation of an effective back office workforce management system revealed a surprising weakness in the existing time tracking tools the company was using. They discovered that they had simply not been collecting accurate time data on productivity for some time. It was a very important part of the process, the company representative said, and sometimes it was painful

13 Complexity As noted, the back office is a multifaceted work environment that is often also intertwined with activity in the contact center. While an automatic call distribution (ACD) system may tell you where a customer call went, the details of what work is being done and how long it will take require more sophisticated technology. To accurately and consistently provide data on performance in the back office, a workforce management system must therefore include the capability to track time spent by each employee on every widget or program used for any given work item. The solution must also be able to track deferred and offline activities, in order to get a full performance picture. Other aspects of the complexity of back office workforce management highlighted at the roundtable included the need to recognize employee successes and scheduling issues. It takes very good data to avoid line imbalances in the back office, such as some groups of employees putting in overtime and other teams remaining not very busy. Similarly detailed and accurate information is needed to reward those employees who are working the hardest in a pay-for-performance initiative. Without clarity regarding complex productivity levels, service level performance goals can be missed and employees can be frustrated. Back to contents >> 24 25

14 Back Office Workforce Management: The Proficiency Solution The challenges to effective workforce management in the back office can be resolved by an effective and comprehensive WFM system. However, that is just the beginning. The roundtable went on to identify three practical stages needed to improve back office proficiency once the WFM solution is in place. In addition, participants highlighted what actions they have taken in their own organizations to help streamline the implementation of their workforce management solution. Capture and Analyze Forecast and Schedule Performance 26 27

15 Capture and Analyze Useful back office analytics depends on an activity monitoring system that resides on an employee s desktop, collecting data on applications used and processes undertaken. Then, this data is analyzed to provide insight into productivity levels, which can be drilled down into on a very granular level, and into which back office processes are actually effective and efficient. Among other questions desktop analytics can address are: How many tasks require rework? How much time is spent on knowledge sharing or learning? Which employees are taking longer than necessary and which are developing best practices that can be shared with the entire team? In order to obtain that value from desktop analytics, a participant in the roundtable emphasized, it is critical to know what to measure and what can practically be measured. This is especially true in a complex back office environment, or a combined back and front office ecosystem. This means that workforce managers must talk through the possibilities with the company s IT teams, business owners and team managers for the most useful outcomes. Even after identifying specific activities to measure, a good back office workforce management solution will collect a tremendous amount of data almost immediately. It is therefore imperative that the workforce manager understands the analytics thoroughly before sharing it further. Analyze it, make sure you understand it, and use that to move your staff in the right places and the right times, counseled the Optum workforce manager. Identifying, measuring and analyzing specific tasks provides a line of sight into what everyone is doing. This, in turn, can be used to establish time standards for better forecasting and scheduling

16 The roundtable then turned to defining and distinguishing productivity and process monitoring in the back office. Process monitoring: You need to be able to measure both online and offline activity throughout a given process. This will define how productivity is defined when monitoring desktop activity. Process monitoring requires employees to start and stop time tracking for each element of the process. Such a tracking structure is complex and time-consuming to build. The process triggers must be consistent, with every employee doing the same work following the same process, and they have to activate their time tracking consistently. This takes time to implement and to get teams acclimated to specific processes and tracking requirements. Productivity monitoring: Desktop monitoring is relatively easy to implement, with analytics measuring productivity in terms of applications used and time spent using them. Desktop analytics do not require employee interface or activation to be effective, as monitoring is based on automatic application activity tracking. Such productivity monitoring can be immediately useful, with information quickly collected and analyzed for reporting purposes. There are two mutually valuable motivations to move the needle on back office performance: a) improved productivity will help ensure that such work is not outsourced; and b) visibility into productivity allows managers to recognize those employees doing a good job, which increases motivation and generates a positive feedback loop. At the same time, it was emphasized by roundtable participants that managers need to know how to use the performance data they receive. It s not only what data you get and what the teams do, said a senior workforce manager, but how the managers are using that data. We can definitely see that managers who tend not to buy in to the data their productivity levels are lower

17 Forecast and Schedule The next stage is putting the collated and analyzed data to work. Our enterprise group found huge benefits once we started getting the data to use it in our regular workforce management processes, a workforce manager told to the roundtable. The new numbers were transformative, in that we could see if resources were lined up, if we had the right number of people, but also that they were doing the right thing. With rich data from the back office, forecasting and scheduling is more precise, taking into account expected work items and their respective average handle times, as well as actual employee availability. Scheduling adherence can also be tracked in real time, in order to ensure maximum value from your workforce management tools. It changes the entire way you forecast and schedule the relevant number of employees, the manager added. And it gives them the authority to start managing their time, managing their schedule. One participant told the roundtable about a dramatic example of how improved activity monitoring has impacted their company s forecasting and scheduling. Once the company had detailed and accurate back office performance data, workforce managers were quite surprised to see that employee productivity fell significantly during overtime hours. As a result, they started limiting or, in some cases, eliminating overtime. In fact, it turned out to be more costefficient and productive to hire additional staff for regular working hours than to add overtime hours to current schedules. Improved visibility into the back office and the resulting accurate productivity measurements often reveal or confirm previously undocumented phenomena, such as underperformance during overtime. While this certainly improves forecasting and scheduling, it can also provide insight into potentially faulty back office processes

18 Moving the Needle on Performance A corporate representative at the roundtable noted, We found loopholes where we weren t getting the data we expected. In fact, it was found that performed activity was not being recorded due to a missing timestamp, which is how the back office was measuring activity. With that data, the workforce managers were able to ask the IT team to identify what, if any, activity was occurring during the periods of time that were unaccounted for. Such a missing timestamp can be seen, for example, if there is no movement by the employee on a given URL, even if he or she is on the site for work purposes. The workforce managers at the roundtable emphasized that the process of implementing the NICE Back Office Workforce Management solution helped them realize the true complexity of a lot of their back office processes. This allowed them to leverage the collected and analyzed data for improvements in their IT systems processes. Another aspect of performance that back office workforce managers must address is employee scheduling adherence. At the roundtable, it was noted that NICE representatives were initially surprised to see how often organizations shift to focus more on scheduling after they adopt a back office workforce management solution. The question was raised regarding how this shift in culture was received by employees. In the case of salaried employees, one of the enterprise managers noted, scheduled hours may be less important, as their work is more project-based. However, in the case of hourly employees, naturally there is a need to make sure they work their scheduled hours and that those hours are used most effectively to meet customer need

19 In fact, real-time schedule adherence may seem counterintuitive in a back office environment, as there is less immediacy to the work items per employee. The focus is naturally more on schedule conformance (i.e., total hours worked, but how you break up your work day is more or less your business). Nonetheless, a workforce manager noted, the application of real-time schedule adherence monitoring provided the employees goals they can meet and be held accountable for in terms of scheduling and performance demands. It was the biggest gain seen so far, according to the manager, with real-time adherence improving quickly by up to 75 percent and better attendance. A workforce manager who was not currently using NICE s real-time schedule adherence monitoring tool explained to the roundtable that a business management team looks at the historical data and determines what percentage of time was productive. Then, they look at outliers and advise those employees of their relative performance. Back to contents >>

20 Back Office Use Cases: From Greater Insight to a More Effective Workforce Optum-UHG, which operates in the health vertical, implemented the NICE Back Office Proficiency Solution for workforce management, including a real-time analytics component. After implementation, the company very quickly saw results, including a 13% improvement in back office schedule adherence. Visibility provided the insight needed into inconsistencies in processes, as well as best practices, which have been used to adapt and standardize effectively. The company s workforce operations manager explained that the results were, in significant part, due to an insistence that both managers and employees fully understood the new productivity monitoring data. This meant focusing on obtaining immediately useful data, using desktop tracking, and ensuring that the data was understood. It s very important to work with the operational team on understanding what we re seeing, the manager said, because the data is massive. Then, it is possible to get buy-in from the back office employees using the system, as well. Once you have the supervisors and their team members on board, you can start working on more complex process monitoring, including offline work. Regarding implementation, a current user of the NICE Back Office Proficiency Solution recommended informing staff that their desktops were being monitored and sharing the data with them. It s amazing the amount of change that happened with us just telling them that, she added. In this case, non-productive browsing immediately went from 5-8% of their activity to under 2%, due to self-policing. In addition, there was a natural increase in productivity very shortly after they were made aware of the application monitoring

21 However, it was noted that prior to informing the staff, it is important to start with tracking current behavior to determine a baseline for what is productive and what is not. In some cases, sites employees are visiting will not be familiar to the workforce managers and investigation will be needed to determine how to categorize it. Optum created adherence reports based more accurately on the computer use in actual practice, with new activity codes, a changed procedural order, open (versus closed) options, and many other changes. Once the baseline was determined and the staff was informed of the real-time monitoring, the Optum manager explained, there was now a set of quantifiable goals that employees could be expected to achieve, something which had not previously existed. Moreover, as there were performance and structural improvements, the company could continually adjust those goals and encourage constant improvement. By way of example, the Optum manager described a team of employees the company had that would be used for both front and back office work, alternating hours for each type of activity. The workforce manager discovered, thanks to the NICE Back Office Proficiency Solution, that the team members were not as productive as they could be due to the time needed during each transition. We worked with the team to understand that, the manager said, and refocus part of the team exclusively on phones and part of the team exclusively on the back office. Real-time monitoring has produced another large effect for Optum - active management of the back office teams, such as an alert to a manager to reach out to an employee who appears idle for an excessive amount of time. In the past, there would hardly have been any interaction between managers and staff unless there was an urgent question or a periodic review

22 The Optum representative said that openness made the cultural shift acceptable, understood and successful. This prompted a question regarding an uptick in employee turnover after implementation of the NICE Back Office Proficiency Solution. We saw attrition go up, the Optum Workforce Manager confirmed, but we also saw productivity go up. So, maybe it was some good attrition happening. That is, the high performers remained and continue to perform well, while low performers have perhaps been weeded out

23 The telecommunications company Verizon implemented the NICE Back Office Proficiency Solution, but without real-time analytics. With a greater focus on the process, they saw dramatic productivity improvement within five months. The collated and analyzed back office activity data identified process failures due to teams not taking the correct actions. A large volume of uncategorized activity could be categorized, for example, and the actual length of given processes could be determined. These data and results were shared with the relevant directors. Upon seeing the numbers, the Verizon representative noted, each director was convinced to quickly adopt the NICE solution. This acceptance produced more analytics and the system could be rolled out to the next group with yet more persuasive data. Visibility was key, said the Verizon Back Office Workforce Manager. Feeding the analyzed data back to the management groups created the momentum needed for the rapid improvements Verizon experienced. Back to contents >> 44 45

24 Summary Steps in the right solution Lessons learned Last words 46 47

25 Steps in the Right Direction 1. Roll-out is always key to the success of a workforce management implementation. A lot of time was spent with the back office supervisors on the data, to ensure clarity of understanding and usefulness. 2. New adherence reports for the back office were based on actual computer work. 3. Employee teams were reorganized to focus on specific types of work, such as the phone queue, back office and escalations. 4. The new solution was focused on increasing productive time, and reducing idle, locked and non-productive time. 5. The data brought higher visibility to the link between back office backlog and call volumes. Lessons Learned 1. Even if something is pushed through by senior leadership, you must have frontline buy-in. 2. You must understand what you are seeing before you share the results. You can track anything, so it has to be carefully calibrated and categorized to provide actionable and clear data. 3. When a team is under pressure, they are not open to change unless it is easy. Part of that is making it visually clear in presenting the data, using graphs, etc. 4. Sometimes it is better to focus staff on what they do best, rather than blending types of work. 5. Back office data is massive, so focus on making small improvements. 6. Employee goals were adjusted based on data collected, encouraging improvement

26 Last Words Visibility is a goal, but you maintain your credibility by making sure the collected data is understood before sharing it. Don t let your current reports limit you. That is, be sure your reports are covering data that is actually actionable fine-grained or generalized, as needed. Back to contents >> 50 51