Back Office Modernization in the Age of Digital Transformation

As businesses continue to take advantage of digitalplatforms to maintain competitive advantage and improve the customer journey, we’re seeing an alarming tendency that negatively impacts legacy organizations in Richmond who’ve been working with the same protocols and tools for a long time.

When businesses begin the trek toward Digital Transformation, they tend to concentrate on customer-facing departments like Customer Service, Sales, and Marketing and neglect the Back Office. While it’s important to improve the customer journey and properly market your products and services, ignoring other parts of the company that also support clients, merchants, partners, and workers can inhibit your capability to provide a seamless experience for all parties.

Our View

In our view, the Back Office is the cornerstone of your business. If your workflow creates bottlenecks, the capacity of your entire organization suffers. For example, let’s say a business brings on a new customer in minutes but requires a long time to train a new employee or vendor. That’s a challenge because both your employees' talent and your supplier’s products play a crucial role in providing exemplary service to the customer. Therefore, if those components are not operating efficiently, your client is ultimately the one who is disadvantaged. Your Front Office can only be as efficient as your Back Office, and both must be included in a strategic digital transformation.

The Digital Back Office

Connected Systems

Systems are integrated intuitively to aid in the user experience for your employees, making it easier for knowledge workers to use more than one platform. By organizing systems so that they’re talking to one another, knowledge workers can avoid double work, make smarter choices, and prioritize more vital priorities.
Purpose Driven Processes

Doing things the way you always have is no longer a valid excuse for dodging change in your company workflows. This stubborn attitude is detrimental to any digital transformation or modernization initiative and should be challenged through education on creating task efficiency and change administration. Every process should have a specific goal, require minimal effort, and be aligned with this greater purpose.
A Seamless Experience

It’s just as important for your employees, partners, and suppliers to have a seamless user experience as it is for your clients. Eliminating inefficient processes should be your first goal, particularly when onboarding new staff. In the age of digital transformation, a complex staffing experience could hurt the livelihood of your entire organization.
Cloud, SaaS, Hybrid Transition

While Cloud and SaaS tools are increasing in use, companies are moving more and more to Cloud and Hybrid architectures and pulling out legacy systems to remain under budget and efficient.
Security Expectations

Your customers, workers, vendors, and partners all assume you will have modernized security best practices active that lessen the possibility of a breach. Knowledge is power in the this digital era and your organization will be expected to protect it without diminishing the user experience.
Intelligent Decision-Making
Businesses should make data-based choices while employing Business Intelligence applications that facilitate decision-making with a 360-degree view that uses multiple data authors and applications.
Task Automation

In the time146] of Intelligent Automation and Machine Learning, processing invoices or purchase orders should involve nominal manpower. Day-to-day processes should be automated so that human capital can concentrate on the most important work.