Realizing Long-Lasting Value From Your Back Office

Transcription

1 Back Office Virtual Roundtable Report 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. Realizing Long-Lasting Value From Your Back Office Part 1 Visibility

2 In Q3 2015, NICE Systems and the Aberdeen Group brought together representatives of seven corporate giants, in a multi-state conference call, to discuss how to get maximum value from their back office operations. The companies taking part in the conversation included both current NICE clients and prospective customers. What took shape was an enriching, open exchange of ideas that included practical advice and much experience from the field. The questions raised and the various answers considered focused on enhancing productivity and performance through integrated back office management. The topics covered were: The Importance of Back Office Visibility How to Manage and Improve Back Office Performance How to Roll Out a Back Office Solution The discussion, which included nearly 30 people in nine different locations, was moderated by NICE Back Office Solutions Experts and a Research Director from Aberdeen Group. NICE Virtual Roundtable Overview Who Was There? Inovalon A leading technology company that combines advanced cloudbased data analytics and datadriven intervention platforms to drive improved healthcare for millions of Americans. Voya Financial A premier retirement, investment and insurance company serving the financial needs of approximately 13 million individual and institutional customers in the United States. Target A leading American retailing company with over 1,800 stores and 37 distribution centers across the United States. Prime Therapeutics An independent pharmacy benefits manager, collectively owned by non-profit health plans, that uses extensive data and patient insights to create programs that lead to the best health outcomes. UPS The largest express carrier and package delivery company in the world, and a leading provider of specialized transportation, logistics, capital, and e-commerce services. Jpmorgan Chase A leader in investment banking, financial services for consumers and small businesses, commercial banking, financial transaction processing and asset management. Aetna One of America s leading diversified health care benefits companies, serving an estimated 46 million people, with a broad range of traditional, voluntary and consumer-directed health insurance plans and related services. The Aberdeen Group A provider of fact-based business intelligence, primary research and unique content-neutral analysis regarding information technology companies and products.

3 Integrated Back Office Management: Why It Matters Aberdeen opened the discussion with a definition of integrated backoffice management: a unified formal program of forecasting, scheduling, measuring and empowering employees, in order to enhance productivity and performance in the back office. Aberdeen research has shown a clear correlation between integrated back office management activities and improved customer satisfaction. In the case of service level agreement aberrations, the difference between a company with an integrated back office solution and one without was found to be over 400%. 400% Improvement In SLA Adherence The Importance of Performance Visibility: Enhanced Productivity A key requirement for any integrated management program is to provide visibility into back office performance. It is the only way a company can know what works, what doesn t and how to measure the effects of strategic changes. From Aberdeen research on the topic, the roundtable learned that companies without effective performance visibility are only getting 34% productivity from their back office employees. On average, this costs companies over $26,000 per employee every year. The difference between a company with an integrated back office solution and one without was found to be over 400%.

4 Visibility in Practice: From Lines in the Sand to Revealing Insights Customers using comprehensive back office solutions provided the roundtable with several insights into what performance visibility has meant for their company, their employees, and overall productivity. More effective training and acknowledging employee successes Identifying real productivity When the company added the Performance Management element, they began measuring productive time against actual work product and KPIs. This combination produced several insights that would otherwise have remained completely hidden. For example, the solution s reporting revealed an unexpected result among telecommuters (those working from home). While they may have been using their online time productively, many of the remote employees were also working offhours, which produced less effective results in practice. To further demonstrate the power of visibility for integrated back office management, one of the attendees shared with the roundtable some real-life examples. In one instance, their Back Office solution, detected an employee s instant messaging application open and active for two hours. A brief and specific conversation clarified the anomaly, isolated problematic behavior and ensured it did not happen again. In other cases the Back Office suite indicated instant messaging was being used excessively, it turned out the employees were using IM to pepper their in-house coaches with questions. While the application was being used for productive activity, the company concluded that it was taking productivity time away from the person asking the question and from the person answering the question. We have a different mechanism for people to askquestions, so we were able to remind them to use it. Confirming Aberdeen s introductory remarks regarding the importance of holistic solutions, they noted that an integrated management approach provided visibility into the constituent parts of employee performance. This made it possible to effectively target employee training and to recognize employee successes - even those that did not necessarily coincide with closed customer cases. One company s Executive Director of Complaints and Appeals deployed the Productivity Monitoring module, which effectively identified where employees were spending their time. This allowed managers to draw lines in the sand regarding productive activity (which websites, applications, etc.), unproductive activity (Facebook, Amazon, etc.), idle time and lock-time. While productivity monitoring quickly identified outliers and facilitated conversations about professional expectations, it also highlighted where conscientious employees were spending too much time due to insufficient training. The roundtable learned: companies with effective performance visibility can save more than $26,000 On Average, Per Employee, Every Year. companies without effective performance visibility are only getting 34% Productivity From Their Back Office Employees.

5 Questions On Visibility: Work appropriate activity? It depends on the job Which employees can benefit from visibility? All of them Adding to the above a director of a company currently using a Back Office suite said that the same performance and visibility standards can be applied to exempt employees (salaried) as to hourly employees. These non-hourly employees are tied into time tracking for payroll, she noted, which can then be used for setting performance benchmarks for them as well. The type of employment agreement an employee has should not be a barrier in adopting a visibility enhancing back office solution, the director concluded. One of the roundtable attendees asked how those currently using a Back Office suite determine whether a website or app is workappropriate. For one company, the answer was starting with a pilot monitoring run, just to passively collected data on what apps or websites personnel were using in practice. Then, management vetted the list, item by item. We have found that, in our business for example, the claims area may have a different set of production applications or websites than the complaint and appeals area. We were very specific, down to the job, as to what we would define as needed for production versus not needed, the company s chief executive explained. She emphasized that such internal differences, which can be found in many companies, should always be taken into account in adapting a performance visibility solution. Current Back Office suite User explains productivity: Productivity Measure How do we accurately measure productivity? Look at both time and task Once work-appropriate activities have been designated, a key question was raised regarding accurate visibility into productivity. After all, an employee can be using a vetted app ineffectively or, alternately, productively using time away from the desktop. A current Back Office suite user explained how they see productivity: There s two pieces. There s productivity time meaning they re spending their time in the right places and then there s completing a task. Some employees are expected to complete one work item (or case) per hour, for example, while others may be expected to complete a single item every five hours. As for time away from the desktop, the company allows for up to 30 minutes idle time during monitoring. If it s more than that, then the employee is to log out and log back in when they return. For this company, it turned out to be a good benchmark. Effectiveness = Spending time in the right place (Doing the right task) Efficiency = Making the most of your time (Doing the task right) Employee time spent in something considered production-oriented 84% Is considered a good benchmark.

6 Making Performance Visibility Work The games people play The Operations Director of a company currently considering how best to adopt an integrated back office management suite asked a pointed question about the games people play to get around the system. As soon as it is realized that wiggling the mouse regularly while it is on an approved webpage or app is enough to appear productive, the door is wide open to gaming the system. Hypothetical examples raised by the roundtable included work at- home employees walking around with a wireless mouse, or desktop users setting the mouse to move automatically and slowly down a single page. Yet again, the answer lies in visibility into both sides of the productivity coin time and task. By measuring not only productivity time, but actual completed tasks, one current NICE customer explained, you would find [these tricks] among the people who are slower. If you suspect someone of that you can go into the RTAM reports of what they were doing every five minutes. One specific indicator of possible productivity problems, noted from field experience, was less movement around the end of the day than at the beginning. With that level of visibility, it was noted, you might be able to hone in on that [discrepancy as suspected inappropriate activity]. Wiggling the mouse Wireless mouse in pocket Auto-scrolling an approved website Motivation is Key One of the more interesting productivity challenges noted at the roundtable concerned how to motivate employees. As it was succinctly put by one of the participants in the discussion: If you have a very,very fast employee that s only doing the amount of work that s requiredand then plays around for the rest of the day, how do you get him to do more? It was agreed that motivating employees to do better is the key. Various methods of motivation were discussed, including gamification. By providing employees with a growing sense of authority and domain expertise, gamification is one of the most effective tools of motivation available as long as there is high visibility into actual productivity metrics.

7 It s All About Up-Front Communication A question on many minds among those considering deploying a desktop analytics-based solution was how employees react to that level of activity monitoring. One of the roundtable participants replied: It s all about communication up front. Employees had to know they were being monitored and they had to know why. In the experience of those who have deployed the Back Office suite, people doing their job are generally happy about the new visibility, because they will be recognized for having carried the weight of the other people for a long time. Most concerned, of course, were those on the other end of the scale. Another way to make sure the performance visibility tool is effective is to communicate clearly with supervisors. Make sure they are on board and know what metrics they are seeing. That way, it was observed, they will have the right conversations with their employees. The data can be misread, a current Back Office suite user warned, and it was an important piece of the roll out which not everyone does to make sure all stakeholders understand the intent of the increased visibility and what is driving the numbers. Constructive Employee Feedback is Very Easy to Incorporate One of the more interesting productivity challenges noted at the roundtable Later, feedback from the employee being monitored is used to tweak the productivity definitions. They might explain, for example, that the company did not identify as productive something that actually was - such as a little known industry or professional website, etc. The categorizations and list of production-related applications can then be changed to reflect the employee feedback. Such post-deployment changes, one company director emphasized, are all done within our reporting tools. So it s very easy to go in and change a table entry from non-production to production.

8 The Results: An Unprecedented 90% Productivity Rate An 84% productivity measure (meaning 84% of an employee s time spent on something considered production-oriented) is considered a good benchmark. We re far exceeding that now, a current NICE customer stated, We re running about 90%. However, the company representative cautioned that the figure does not include training, surfing internal blogs or looking at the company website as productive in the formal sense. Had it done so, the results may have approached 100% productivity. The same customer said they immediately saw a 15% increase in productivity when we rolled out the tool. And we had no complaints to our HR department and I believe that s attributed to the open communication we had, as well as the validation on the back end that everyone signed off on. The Key Performance Indicators You Should Be Measuring Employee productivity (which employees are most productive, which apps are they using that are productive, and which not) SLA adherence ratio (based on internal targets) Total employee utilization (the percent of employees engaged in productive tasks at any given time; can be correlated with case resolution, training, etc.) Case quality score (the ability to attain given targets, based on internal standards) Case completion rates (the percent of cases or tasks completed; and done on time) These common aspects to monitor and evaluate are a good place to start, Aberdeen s Research Director added, but businesses may use other metrics as well, depending on the industry (e.g., clinical trials completed, etc.). Aberdeen concluded the discussion of visibility with recommendations as to the right KPIs to measure for maximum performance visibility.