What are Back Office Operations?
Most organizations split office roles between front office and back office employees.
The front office team structure includes departments like sales and customer service, that interact directly with customers, prospects, and other stakeholders.
There is a big difference between back office and front office employees regarding their day-to-day schedule.
Front office staff attend client meetings or take support calls to maintain your brand image, keep customers happy, and build new business.
In the meantime, back office workers are focused on improving efficiencies, keeping current with compliance, and cutting operational costs.
Back Office Responsibilities
Back office staff support the front office. They handle a range of essential, behind-the-scenes responsibilities that create a smooth-functioning business.
HR, IT, finance, and administration are some of the most common departments that handle back office functions.
They want to find ways to make tasks easier, reduce overhead, or solve any other problems that come up. Back office responsibilities include:
- Order Management: Processing sales orders and coordinating with suppliers to ensure timely restocking and order fulfillment.
- Human Resources Support: Onboarding new employees, and managing other employee paperwork (discipline plans, etc).
- Compliance and Risk Management: Ensuring the company follows industry regulations and managing risk by maintaining security and compliance documentation.
- Financial and Accounting Services: Processing invoices, managing accounts payable and receivable, reconciling bank statements, and preparing financial reports.
- IT and Systems Support: Maintaining internal systems, troubleshooting technical issues, and making cybersecurity decisions about software vendors to protect sensitive data.
- Administrative Support: Creating work templates, managing in-house software setup, preparing documents, scheduling meetings, and supporting front office staff with necessary information and resources.
- Process Optimization: Continuously evaluating processes to identify areas to improve efficiency, cost savings, or workflows.
How to Improve Quality in Back Office Operations
Every company strives to be as efficient as possible.
Your organization’s performance hinges on streamlined, responsive back office operations and reliable support systems.
Here are some best practices for how to improve quality in your back office operations:
- Invest in Technology and Automation: Technology, like esignature, workflow, or business process automation software, makes daily work easier, reduces manual tasks, and allows for better tracking and workflow management.
- Maintain Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs): Clear SOPs ensure consistency, reduce errors, and maintain high quality across all tasks. Regularly review and update these policies and procedures.
- Improve Employee Training and Development: Offer continuous training programs to help back office staff stay current with industry best practices, software tools, and compliance requirements.
- Set Clear KPIs and Performance Metrics: Define key performance indicators (KPIs) for back office tasks, such as processing time, error rates, and cost efficiency.
- Enhance Communication and Collaboration: Implement tools, like automatic event notifications, to promote collaboration between back office and front office teams. Back office staff can stay informed on customer deals and take over as soon as possible — without manual follow ups.
- Emphasize Compliance and Risk Management: Put policies in place to meet regulatory standards. Look for vendors who are committed to security to simplify compliance.
PDCflow for Better Back Office Operations
One big challenge of back office operations is to follow what’s going on during front office operations.
Sales orders, customer agreements, and payment due dates can be time consuming to keep track of manually. Accounting, data entry departments or other administration and support staff need access to this information to get work done.
If your paperwork is sent by traditional mail, personal email addresses, or if front office staff do lots of business by phone, tracking becomes complicated.
PDCflow esignature, document delivery, and payment software makes it possible to set up, send, and track all your important requests via email or SMS. That way, every team member can use or monitor the workflows that are essential to their roles.
Efficiency
PDCflow’s software streamlines the way companies do work.
This is true for the fast, reliable digital communication, requests, and payments customers see, but also for the back office functions only your staff will access.
- Reusable templates: Create a template once to save time on future messages. Admin can create the types of messages front-line staff will need to send, so all they have to do is choose the correct one.
- Flexible workflows: Don’t waste time finding workarounds to create the messages you need to send. Flow lets you add documents, payment or esignature requests, multiple recipients/signing order, custom branding and custom messages, and other options for flexibility.
- Bulk sends: Save more time for your staff. Make it easy to send a large number of messages at once with bulk sends. Through a simple spreadsheet upload, a single back office employee can create and send up to 5,000 messages at once.
- Reconciliation: For more efficient bookkeeping practices, PDCflow lets you send payment requests along with other digital messages. That way, you can track esignatures and payments through our Insights Reports for easy reconciliation and a fuller understanding of your business.
- Event notifications: Know when a message is opened and when it was completed by tracking workflows with automated updates. Opt into notifications and receive an update via email as your customer message moves through the process, so you never miss a deal or drop the ball on serving your customer.
- Flow reminders: For faster, more efficient processes you need to eliminate mundane, repetitive tasks whenever possible. Automated features make it faster to check in on customers without human intervention. Set up a Flow reminder, and an automatic notice will give your customer another nudge to finish the request before their message expires.
Security and Compliance
Cyber security should be an essential concern for every business. Are your communications with customers secure? Are your payment portals safe? Do you know how or where your sensitive customer data is stored?
Companies who choose PDCflow can take advantage of a number of security features that make messages, requests, and payments more secure than ever.
- Dual authentication: If you send private messages to customers, or worry about who might have access, set up a PIN for your customer Flow. Use a shared secret only you and the recipient will know. That way, you can rest knowing the right person is opening your message.
- HIPAA compliance: Sometimes, privacy is more than just a nice feature to have. Flow Technology is a HIPAA compliant messaging system and is great for businesses that are subject to HIPAA regulations.
- Payment security: It’s important to find an esignature software that also understands payment security. PDCflow’s secure storage, encryption, and tokenization protect customer payment data and make it easier for companies to follow PCI compliance.
Cost Effective
Many digital communication or esignature software companies charge high prices through a long-term contract just to access the features you need to run your back office properly.
At PDCflow we don’t cap how many messages you can send, count how many people log in, or hide features you need.
- No per-user costs: Some companies charge $25 or more per month for each login you will need. At this price, collaboration becomes unaffordable. PDCflow doesn’t charge per user. Give all your staff the logins they need at no additional monthly charge.
- No guesswork on how much you’ll send: With other esignature software companies, you have to guess ahead of time how many messages you’ll send and buy a plan accordingly. If you go over this amount, you will have to pay more. However, PDCflow charges per send. This way, you don’t buy a plan that’s too large, and you don’t have to worry about going over your limit.
- No hidden functionality: Some competitors make you choose a higher pricing tier just to access SMS sends, bulk sends, or other important features. PDCflow doesn’t require you to pay more, just to access certain features your company needs.
Do you have more questions about how PDCflow’s esignature, document, and payment software can improve back office operations?
Request a demo today.
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- ABOUT THE AUTHOR -
Hannah Huerta, Marketing Specialist
Hannah Huerta is a Marketing Specialist at PDCflow. She creates content for the accounts receivable and payment industry.
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