Digitalising the back office: Better customer experience and improved operations

It’s great to see that so many companies strive for a better customer experience and make changes to their strategy to ensure customers are satisfied.

It’s also a smart move given that there is a lot of competition in many industries and when the product or service is similar, customer service and satisfaction can be give you a competitive advantage.

However, when it comes to digital transformation, companies are doing what they can to digitalise customer facing processes, without also thinking about thinking about digitalising the back office processes and the benefits they can bring.

The benefits of digitalising the back office

Optimising front-end, customer facing processes is no bad thing, especially if it makes the life of the customer easier. But what we can’t understand is why a company would digitalise so many processes on the front end and not digitalise the back office operations.

To put it into perspective, here are some of the benefits that digitalising back office processes bring to a company:

• Lower operational costs
• Increased revenue
• Better employee productivity
• Improved research and development
• More efficient processes
• More time for employees to work on higher value tasks
• Better alignment between departments
• Better customer experience

The list goes on...

Think about it in a different way, the performance of the back office affects the performance of the customer facing processes, i.e. when a supplier isn’t paid in time and services are on hold, the front end is affected by this, potentially leaving a disgruntled customer.

Even with a more efficient digitalised front-end process, the customer is still left unsatisfied by a back-office process error.

That supplier not being paid might have been human error, purely from having too much to do in a limited amount of time with processes being spread among different people, mostly on paper.

By digitalising this back office process, the operation is improved, the supplier can be paid on time without the manual intervention of someone in finance (who now has more time) and the customer is kept happy because they’re still receiving the end product/service on time.

Digitalising document management and the mailroom

Where paper is involved, the processes are often inefficient. Two examples of this are document management and the mailroom.

They are both back-end procedures that when digitalised offer a better customer experience and improved overall operations.

For document management, part of the struggle comes with accessing files and how they’re being used. If a file is hidden away somewhere in a cupboard, there is a time delay involved in finding the file and making sure the person looking for the file has access to where it’s kept.

If a customer was to get in contact by phone or through an online chat, asking about invoice details, they may have to wait while the employee finds the file to go through. By digitalising the document management process, when the customer calls, it’s much faster to find and access the file, improving the customer experience.

The mailroom is another great example of a back-office process that can affect customer experience and when optimised can improve operations.

Firstly, when referring to the mailroom, we’re not just thinking about paper mail, it’s about all communications coming in including email, fax, and mobile communications.

By digitalising these processes through capturing all incoming mail and communications, digitising it and then distributing to the correct recipient, employees have access to all their mail instantly, no matter where they’re working from, in or out of the office.   

As well as the improved operational efficiency, the smooth running of these back office processes, such as those above,  allows for a better customer experience as it filters through to the products and services being offered and any employee interactions with customers.

In a nutshell, why digitalitise front-end processes if the driving back-end processes are still inefficient and potentially problematic?

In order for all business processes to align, back office processes also need to be digitalised.