David Preece, Consultant at QStory, and 28-year veteran of the contact centre planning industry, shares his thoughts on why blending front and back office environments enables businesses to be more resilient, cost-effective, and more able to deliver positive customer experiences.
For many, many years, contact centres have included a pretty clear divide: frontline agents handle live channels (calls, chat, and messaging), while back office teams take responsibility for follow-ups, case work, and administrative tasks. And, in many instances, it’s a case of ne’er the twain shall meet. I’m certain we are all familiar with this setup and, on paper, it seems logical and easy to manage. The reality is, though, that it creates growing risks that many organisations now feel every day — rising costs, frustrated customers, burned-out employees, and operations that struggle to flex to meet the inevitable changes in demand.
This traditional model is built on a century-old industrial logic — divide tasks by specialisation, measure outputs by simple volume, and manage each silo independently — and driven by the difficulties in understanding back office workloads. Yet what worked in theory does not work in the messy complexity of customer experience today. Because, after all, customers don’t operate in siloes, and crises don’t unfold in tidy, departmental ‘buckets’. And volatility — both in demand and workforce supply — is not really the exception; these days, it’s the norm.
The cost of siloed environments
I am sure that every reader of this article knows that customer expectations continue to rise whilst, unfortunately, budgets perpetually tighten. So, suddenly, not blending live channels and your back office work feels less of a natural choice and more like a potential strategic liability.
Customer expectations have shifted dramatically in the last decade. A 2024 global customer experience study found that 61% of consumers expect brands to resolve most service issues in a single interaction, regardless of the channel they’ve used. Yet many contact centres still divide work into “live” versus “back office,” delaying resolution, whilst frustrating and disappointing customers.
As every forecaster and Intraday Analyst knows only too well, live-channel demand is permanently volatile. In most contact centres, volumes can fluctuate by 30–50% over the course of a single day, a figure that only grows in peak seasons or after significant events. And it’s not just demand that is volatile. Variations in supply levels from expectations due to absence, holiday, training, and offline time can reduce plans to rubble. Even the best forecasting and schedule flexibility won’t prevent this volatility from creating quiet periods where front office agents have little or no work available.
Within a non-blended, siloed environment, this idle time is immediately lost in the wind. Many organisations effectively are carrying the equivalent of around 10% idle time during quieter periods in live channels, simply because agents are restricted to a single work type. While this is happening, the back office is unsuccessfully wrestling increasing queues and backlogs.
This is not just an efficiency problem. It’s a fragile capacity problem. When one part of the organisation is starved of work and another is drowning, the overall system becomes unbalanced. The result is both familiar and frustrating: idle hands on one side of the divide and mounting pressure, costly overtime, or service-level failures on the other.
It’s not about additional heads
If front and back office are always, or even almost always, separate, the default response to increasing backlogs is often to throw more people at the problem. All this serves to achieve is an increase in cost without in any way addressing the underlying problem.
The mathematics are stark: hiring more people – in front or back office environments – increases operational costs directly. Yet, because the problem was never truly about headcount, but more about how they were deployed, the backlogs return, and costs compound. Working in siloes forces contact centres to absorb variability and volatility with money instead of flexibility.
In fact, research has found that businesses with siloed operations may lose up to 30% of their potential revenue due to inefficiency, as colleagues aren’t able to collaborate on customer cases or have the insight they need into previous customer experiences. Any spend on additional heads therefore rarely buys better outcomes in the long term, it might provide a temporary life or cushioning effect, but the problem has been soothed, rather than cured.
The impact on customers
The business bottom line is not the only thing to feel the pinch from a lack of blending – your customers are suffering, too. In truth, customers don’t care whether their issue is classed as a “front office” or “back office” one. And nor should they! They care about how long it takes to get resolved.
When issues or processes pass through a number of hands, resolution slows down. It is widely accepted that first-contact resolution is lower in environments where frontline agents cannot complete related back office actions themselves. Every handoff between teams adds to overall resolution time, even for relatively straightforward tasks. And delays have a compound effect on workload. Customers who have work waiting in back office backlogs are more likely to contact your business again, generating additional inbound demand that contact centres then struggle to manage.
Just take a moment to think about that: in trying to segment and control work, organisations are inadvertently creating failure demand — demand caused not by new issues, but by unfinished, unclear, or delayed work. Every callback, every repeated inquiry, and each and every follow-up message is a feedback loop of inefficiency back into the system.
The impact on employees
Let’s not forget, also, that the rigid role separation between front and back office takes its toll on employees — and this has real consequences for them and for your business.
Dealing with live channel contacts is, if we are honest, a tough gig. The work can require high levels of concentration, endlessly-repeated empathy, and rapid-fire problem resolution, with very little downtime. Front line contact centre attrition remains historically high. Across the industry, annual turnover sits somewhere between 30–45%, with burnout and work-related stress frequently cited as leading factors.
Back office roles, by contrast, may feel less pressured on the surface, yet roles can become highly repetitive. Often, workers become disconnected from actual customer outcomes and lose sight of the wider purpose of their work. Back office staff are therefore at risk of significantly lower engagement levels than those in more varied, blended roles, often citing that they feel treated as less important or valued than their front line colleagues.
This internal divide mirrors a similarly marked difference in customer perception. When employees feel undervalued or disconnected, it shows up in customer experience. For example, organisations with highly engaged employees see up to 23% better customer satisfaction metrics than those with disengaged workforces.
It is said that contact centres that introduce blended models have the potential to see attrition drop significantly in the first year following transformation. Any improvement is significant when you consider that replacing an experienced agent typically costs 20–30% of their annual salary, when you take into account recruitment, training, and lost productivity. Blending work types not only redistributes the load more intelligently but also enhances engagement and fosters a sense of ownership over outcomes.
The difficulty of volatility
Working in non-blended siloes also presents problems when demand changes suddenly — even if it is in some way expected. Unusual events such as system outages, billing issues, or marketing campaigns can increase inbound volumes enormously — sometimes in a matter of hours. With “thou-shalt-not-pass” siloes in place, back office workers are often unable to support live channels, even if they have availability.
This leaves front office managers reliant on expensive solutions: overtime, temporary staff, call avoidance strategies, or automation, and all of these approaches carry hidden costs and risks. Overtime increases payroll costs; temporary workers can dilute quality and avoidance strategies frustrate and alienate customers if not delivered correctly.
Additionally, when work does spike in this manner, a hidden-tsunami of additional workload can be generated that almost always catches businesses out — many of these additional contacts trigger internal or customer-driven processes that generate back office work. As a result, once the spike passes, back office backlogs are often left even further behind, with little scope for additional support to bail them out.
By contrast, blended operations often recover faster from major incidents, returning to normal service levels days earlier than non-blended environments. By cross-training agents and allowing work to flow to available capacity wherever it exists, these operations reduce bottlenecks and benefit from some built-in resilience.
Without such flexibility, contact centres remain brittle and fragile — able to cope with business-as-usual, but ponderous and costly when circumstances change.
Changing customer expectations
But perhaps the biggest risk of all is falling out of step with what your customers expect from you. Customers increasingly expect same-day or near-real-time resolution, even for issues that once sat comfortably with service-level targets measured in days. In fact research has found that 83% of customers now expect to interact with a customer service agent immediately upon contacting the business.
Satisfaction scores drop sharply when customers feel a lack of ownership, even if the final outcome is correct. This is because customers don’t see departments or job titles; all they see is delay, repetition, and handoffs. Think of your own interactions with businesses in your day-to-day life: contact centres that maintain a strict front/back office divide often feel slower and less responsive, and less interested in you as a customer, particularly when compared with their competitors that may have adopted more flexible, blended models.
The strategic imperative
Not blending live channels and back office work is often perceived as a safe choice. Many businesses do not fully understand the scale of the work happening behind the scenes in their back office due to an inherent lack of visibility in the back office space. And, without that information to drive proper data-driven decisions, it’s easier and natural to keep back office separate and concentrate on the environment with the richest data.
But there is a cost to this safe choice. Wasted capacity, misused resources, slower resolution, higher levels of failure demand, burned-out and drained employees, and brittle operations may not be isolated problems — they may be symptoms of an outdated operating model.
Blending workforces is not merely about filling quiet time in call centre queues. It’s about rethinking how work flows through your organisation, how your teams are empowered, and your customers’ outcomes. It’s about recognising that agility and flexibility are the grease on the axles of modern customer service. Businesses that are able to embrace blending as a strategic principle rather than an efficiency tactic are often more resilient, more cost-effective, and more able to deliver positive customer experiences.