Scenario 3: Back Office Operations
Having a highly effective back office operation is fundamental your business.
All customer orders, requests and queries come through your back office. The back office team is required to process a large variety of customer-generated requests. Account set up and changes, order follow up, complaints and general queries. A good portion of the work involves ‘cash’: sending invoices, collecting money, as well as paying bills. The source of queries is either via phone, letter, email or your website. Depending on the source and query type, turn-around times are variable.
Things aren’t operating as well as you would like. Work builds up, causing backlogs and complaints. Overtime is frequently used to manage this.
Your managers believe they don’t have enough people to get on top of the work. Yet staff costs are increasing quicker than revenues. And while work flow seems to be variable, your people seem to achieve more when it is busy and less when it is quiet.
You get complaints every day, with managers spending a lot of time answering calls and chasing up overdue work – but your people seem to be proud of how well they handle customer complaints!
You’re not really sure of how truly busy the team is, although absenteeism seems to reflect them being overworked. For you the situation is stressful, you used to really enjoy the business now you seem to be overwhelmed.
Somehow your team needs to get back in control, sort out the backlog to stop the complaints!
