{"id":17226,"date":"2025-05-13T09:02:52","date_gmt":"2025-05-13T08:02:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/qstory.ai\/us\/?p=17226"},"modified":"2026-01-21T14:30:18","modified_gmt":"2026-01-21T14:30:18","slug":"bringing-the-back-office-to-front-of-mind-achieving-visibility-and-flexibility","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qstory.ai\/us\/blog\/2025\/05\/13\/bringing-the-back-office-to-front-of-mind-achieving-visibility-and-flexibility\/","title":{"rendered":"Bringing the Back-Office to Front of Mind: Achieving Visibility and Flexibility with QStory"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

David Preece, Principal Solutions Consultant at QStory<\/a>, and 28-year veteran of the contact centre planning industry, shares his thoughts on solving the back-office challenge.<\/em><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s fair to say that, in the world of contact centres, information is King. It is vital to the success of the centre and to the relentless spinning of the planning cycle that we understand what drives our work, how long it takes to do a piece of work, how productive our agents are and what agents are actually doing versus their schedule. Oh, and about a million other data points are really useful, too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thankfully, information and data are not in short supply when agents are in a \u2018live\u2019 channel such as telephony or chat. There is a veritable feast of data points for analysts to gorge themselves on in these channels, helping the business to have visibility of every single thing that an agent does, every second of every single day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And people like me who love splashing about in data have a whale of a time scuba-diving to great depths to find ever more insightful ways to use that visibility to bring clarity and eventually success to our businesses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s a real pity that the same can\u2019t be said for the back-office environment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I mentioned a key word earlier: visibility. Unfortunately, planning for the back-office is often akin to trying to look for something in a room from behind a locked door \u2013 you know it\u2019s in there somewhere, but you can\u2019t access it and you definitely can\u2019t see it. As a result, businesses often know almost nothing about how productive their back-office environment is.  They don\u2019t really know how many people they need, if the people they have are skilled correctly to handle the incoming work or, scarily, whether they are on the brink of disaster when it comes to service levels.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I\u2019ve been engaged in planning for back-office, one thing was abundantly clear to me \u2013 I could tell you the amount of work that we had outstanding right now, but I couldn\u2019t reliably tell anyone how much work we would have outstanding in three days\u2019 time or when our outstanding work was going to be so old that it was prompting follow up contacts from the customer. \u201cAre we sailing through this or drowning?\u201d<\/em>, \u201cSorry, I just don\u2019t know, I don\u2019t have the visibility.\u201d. \u201cDo we have enough people?\u201d, \u201cErm\u2026Possibly. Probably. Almost Certainly\u2026\u201d<\/em>. On top of this, agents in the back-office are being badly left behind in terms of schedule flexibility and the protection of the precious work\/life balance. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Talking to friends throughout the industry, it seems like things haven\u2019t really moved on in the intervening years \u2013 all the problems I encountered are still being faced today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I reckon you\u2019ve probably figured out where I\u2019m going with this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You see, I work for QStory, a company that looks at insurmountable problems, smiles to itself and gently shakes its head, rolls up its sleeves and engineers beautiful solutions. And I\u2019m proud to say that we have done it again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

QStory has now developed a compelling new platform for your back-office environment<\/a> that will:<\/p>\n\n\n\n