Back Office Modernization in the Age of Digital Transformation

As companies continue to leverage digitaltools to remain competitive and improve the customer journey, we’re beginning to see an alarming trend that harms legacy organizations in St. Louis who’ve been working with the same processes and tools for decades.

When companies begin the trek toward Digital Transformation, they tend to prioritize customer-facing departments like Customer Service, Sales, and Marketing and neglect the Back Office. While it’s vital to improve the customer experience and accurately market your services, neglecting other parts of the company that also support clients, merchants, partners, and workers can hinder your capability to provide a smooth experience for everyone involved.

Our View

In our view, the Back Office is the heart of your business. If your system creates inefficiencies, the capacity of your entire organization pays for it. For example, let’s say a company brings on a new client in minutes but requires several weeks to train a new employee or vendor. That’s a problem because both your employees' talent and your supplier’s products play a critical role in providing exemplary service to the customer. Therefore, if those components are not operating smoothly, your client is ultimately who pays the price. Your Front Office can only be as capable as your Back Office, and both must be considered during a strategic digital transformation.

The Digital Back Office

Connected Systems

Systems are connected logically to aid in the user experience for your employees, making it smoother for knowledge workers to use more than one tool. By aligning systems so that they’re talking to one another, knowledge workers can avoid duplicative work, make wiser decisions, and concentrate on more important priorities.
Purpose Driven Processes

Doing it the way you’ve always done it is no longer a good reason for dodging change in your company processes. This inflexible attitude is detrimental to any digital transformation or modernization goal and should be resolved through education on creating work expertise and change control. Every task should have a specific goal, require the least manpower, and be aligned with this strategic initiative.
A Seamless Experience

It’s just as vital for your staff, partners, and suppliers to have a smooth user experience as it is for your clients. Eliminating inefficient jobs should be your first priority, particularly when onboarding new employees. In the age of digital transformation, a tedious staffing work flow could threaten the health of your whole organization.
Cloud, SaaS, Hybrid Transition

While Cloud and SaaS platforms are increasing in utilization, organizations are moving more and more to Cloud and Hybrid structures and pulling out legacy systems to remain cost-effective and efficient.
Security Expectations

Your customers, staff, merchants, and partners all expect you to have modern security protocols in place that minimize the possibility of a breach. Knowledge is power in the this digital generation and your business will be expected to keep it safe without hurting the user experience.
Intelligent Decision-Making
Organizations should make data-driven judgments while utilizing Business Intelligence tools that facilitate decision-making with a birds-eye view that uses multiple data authors and tools.
Task Automation

In the age146] of Intelligent Automation and Machine Learning, processing invoices or purchase orders should require little effort. Day-to-day jobs should be automated so that staff can prioritize the most important jobs.