Front Office is rapidly becoming a modern generic term. Everybody seems to be recognising the need to have a Front Office, but I wonder if they’ve done the extra thinking about processes and systems. Without the right philosophy and tools any Front Office is nothing more than a new name for the typical call centre, or service counter. And that’s quite often what happens when large organisations adopt new ideas. The only things that change are the words they use. Everything else remains business as usual.
Last week I came across the best example yet – a union official. He claimed the budget cuts being imposed on a particular government department wouldn’t only affect the notorious for waste Back Office. They would also mean reductions in the Front Office – the part of the organisation dealing with the public, providing those services we apparently need so badly. So now we have it – unions and governments recognise they have Front Offices too.
The term originally started in the hotel industry with the concept of the front desk. The theatre business adopted the concept with its Box Office morphing into the Front Office. Subsequently the idea spread through service industries into manufacturing, and finally into government.
Now we have the full picture. Organisations of all types recognise they have back offices where the internal processes are performed, and front offices where they interact with people outside their business, or department – where the external processes enable different interests to meet and collaborate.
The type of organisation doesn’t matter. Those external interests can be the public, customers, followers, partners and even supply chain. What does matter is those all have their own interests, processes and organisations. In the Front Office our systems have to allow us to interact with other people’s ways of doing things. That means they need to be flexible, and empower (not control) our sales and customer service staff.
In The Difference Between Back Office and Front Office we commented on an article written by CRM expert Denis Pombriant. In this blog you’ll find lots more comment about the need for flexible, enabling software in that space where customers run into bureaucrats who can only see the world from their own perspective.
We believe this stuff, and that’s why Front Office Box works the way it does. Not the way the accountants or IT guys want, but the way sales and customer service people need. It’s enabling technology – not a mechanism for management reporting.
One day the world’s going to realise the Business Process Re-Engineering movement got it wrong, at least as far as customer service is concerned. It’s impossible for any provider to decide which is the best process for customer service, because the customers are in control of that.
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