Task allocation in the back office

Dudley Larus, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Genesys, explains how to streamline task allocation for back office process.

28% of time wasted manually prioritising tasks

Research has shown that a significant 17 minutes every hour – that’s 28% of an employee’s time – can be wasted by the decision process of self-selecting the next task. And it’s not just the employees that are suffering, the organisation and customers are, too, because tasks aren’t selected on business prioritisation or promises on service fulfilment or critical compliance needs.

Case-study: Huk-Coburg, German Insurer

Huk-Coburg receives ten million pieces of paper correspondence, two million faxes and emails and around ten million telephone calls each year. Employees were cherry-picking their assignments, choosing tasks that they fancied handling but not necessarily focusing on the right task at the right time.

Changing workload peaks swamped employees. For example, in autumn car owners have a short window of time to change policies, meaning huge backlogs of work were building up in the back office. And, because departments were siloed, some departments worked flat-out whilst others had light workloads.

Streamlining

There is an answer emerging that offers a solution to the multichannel mess. A new type of application called workload management provides the right facilities, at the right time. It manages the workload, but doesn’t want to be the work-flow engine. The workload management solution operates as an intelligent or smart ‘overlay’ to all the channels that are the sources for customer service work tasks. The work sources include work-flow systems such as BPM and CRM and channels such as email, fax, social media, web forms and more.

How does workload management work?

When an employee is required as part of a work-flow process or to handle off-queue work like email, the workload management solution is notified through an API and manages both the task prioritisation process as well as the selection of the most appropriate resource. Task priorities are managed through business rules by business people and are based on elements such as service level agreements, company strategy and compliance rules. Resources are selected based on skills, experience, presence and availability for new work. Workload management solutions even operate with real-time channels like voice. Phone calls, along with non-real-time work like email or cases can all be prioritised together.

For example, if an insurance employee is working on a claims case with an extremely high priority, phone calls are routed to other resources leaving the person undisturbed.

Dr. Hofer of Huk Coburg explained one of the key benefits: “If the solution capacities were oriented only toward telephony, an optimal workload would never be possible. With work distribution now across departments and bridging silos, case resolution and accessibility has soared. A customer who calls in response to an offer is worth his or her weight in gold. We respond immediately to these inquiries and today have achieved an accessibility rate of 99%. And, we have a successful first-call resolution rate of 80% for all cases.”