Back Office
What is Back Office?
The Back Office is the part of a company that is not front-facing and can include various functions from customer support, administration, accounting and IT.
Back-office work is the processing that happens behind customer-facing conversations, such as handling claims, updating accounts, approving refunds, fulfilling orders or resolving billing exceptions. It is usually carried out by operations, finance, administration or IT teams rather than frontline agents, and it often lives in separate systems and queues.
The link between front office and back office has a large effect on customer experience. When a request leaves the contact center and stalls in a back-office queue, customers call back to chase it, creating avoidable contacts. Many organizations route back-office tasks through the same work distribution as customer interactions, so they can be prioritized, tracked and measured. Common measures include turnaround time, backlog age and repeat contacts caused by delays.
Related: Task, Robotic process automation (RPA), Digital workers, Failure demand.