If you’re like many managers of inbound call centers, you’re diligently optimizing your customer-facing processes. Are our back-office operations being taken care of?

You’re training supervisors.

You’re scripting responses.

And you’re installing tools for managing multiple channels.

You’re even investing in the latest call center technology.

In short, you’re doing everything you can to boost customer service. That’s great.

Inbound call centers are on your company’s frontlines. Improvements there boost customer satisfaction and increase profits.

But are you optimizing back-office operations?

If you’re not, you’re doing only half the job.

If you’re not optimizing your back office, you’re missing a golden opportunity to boost efficiency, reduce costs, and increase revenues.

More important, you’re missing a golden opportunity to boost customer service, increase customer satisfaction, and create a sustainable competitive advantage.

Below are 7 steps you can take to optimize back-office operations and take your inbound call center to the next level.

Develop a plan

Creating a plan to optimize back-office operations is critical. A good plan aligns all the different moving parts in the environment—systems, people, schedules, tasks, and business priorities. This in turn unlocks new efficiencies and cuts costs.

Invest In Management Technologies

Investing in workforce and workload management technologies does wonders. Key tools in executing your plan, these technologies streamline back-office operations and align all its moving parts—including tasks from different systems, employee schedules and availability, business priorities, and service level commitments.

Optimize Employee Performance

Employees are the most important part of your back office. But you must optimize them to really impact efficiency and productivity. The key: knowing who is available for which type of work. Without this knowledge, you could end up assigning a critical task to an employee visiting his doctor for a check-up.

Create A Task List For Your Back Office Teams

Funneling all work items and tasks from all the different systems into a single global task list is imperative. It provides complete visibility into the whole scope of your back office. It’s essential if you want to track planning and schedule resources.

Prioritize Back Office Tasks Based On Business Rules

Creating a global task list lets you prioritize the task list based on configurable rules. Take advantage of this opportunity. Prioritizing tasks ensures that critical or time-sensitive jobs don’t get stuck behind non-critical, non-time-sensitive ones.

Assign Tasks To The Right People For Back Office Operations

Assigning tasks to the right people boosts productivity. Use automatic, rules-based task assignments to assign jobs. They eliminate the problem of workers “cherry-picking” the easiest tasks over the more critical ones, the need for supervisors to manually assign tasks, and concerns over unfairness and favoritism.

Create Forecasts And Schedules For Your Back Office

Understanding workloads and priorities enable you to make more accurate predictions on workforce needs. It helps you better handle changes in task volume, differences in task times, and measures alterations in performance. Plus, it helps you effectively manage more employees, reducing the supervisor to worker ratio.

Taking these 7 steps to optimize back-office operations helps you better meet customer expectations and boost customer satisfaction, driving up sales and profits,

What’s more, it can help transform your company from an also-ran in your industry to a market leader. Don’t do half a job with your inbound call center.

Optimize both sides of the desk, not just the customer-facing side.

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