Measure Back-Office Activities with Desktop Analytics

Every business exists on numbers (the good and bad) and yet it’s surprising how often organizations overlook the business basic tenet of “You cannot manage what cannot measure” in their back offices. Many back offices have not fully automated their activities, nor have they eliminated much of their costly staff despite millions of dollars spent on complex business process management initiatives. Instead, these responsibilities of these departments have become increasingly complicated, and more employees are being assigned to do the same amount of work because of it. Back offices need automated tools to track their work and optimize the performance of their employees in order to improve efficiency and reduce costs.

The challenge is that in order for back-office performance management to be effective, the department needs a way to accurately track work items. Most organizations track work production at a high level, recording the total number of items received, in-process, and completed on a daily basis. If ten out of ten projects are completed the day is considered a success. While this is useful, it does little to identify internal bottlenecks and under-performing employees and systems. The finer details get lost in the daily number churn. Desktop analytics solutions are an effective way to address this issue.

Desktop analytics measures back office application utilization, patterns and performance metrics in order to assess application and user efficiency, effectiveness, compliance and ultimately the impact on the customer. This includes measuring how employees interact with their desktop applications and evaluating the performance of those back-office applications. Simply put, desktop analytics applications monitor how employees use and interact with their servicing applications, and can track and report on all employee activities.

Too often the blame for poor back-office optimization is initially laid at the feet of the employee, while sometimes application inefficiencies and issues leave an agent’s hands tied. Desktop analytics not only tracks agent behavior, but also all various applications respond and interact with each other. A slow-loading application, or one that doesn’t tie well into others, can have a dramatic impact on back-office productivity.

Desktop analytics feeds data about the work started and accomplished by each employee into the performance management application, giving back-office managers a detailed view of all tasks and activities that were started and completed for every hour of the day. This information is used to generate service level reports that reflect how well each employee, site and the department overall has met their goals for a particular day, week, month, or any other time period. Desktop analytics solutions allow managers to track work at the task level, identify employee skill gaps and coaching opportunities, speed up cycle time, and reduce error rates and re-work. The end result is improved transparency and productivity.

The beauty of desktop analytics is that it can paint as broad or as specific of a picture a manager might want to see about their back-office operations.