When you neglect the back office, it starts working against you. HR, regulatory compliance, accounting, record maintenance, settlements, IT, and other back-office teams are life-critical for providing decent service at the front office and staying in touch with customers. These teams are also essential for making your business profitable and effective.

The back office comprises multiple operations and requires throughout optimization at different levels. The only possible way to optimize hundreds of business processes is through automation services, machine learning, and RPA.

Today we’ll focus on two aspects of back-office automation: offline communications and compliance. Check out this article to learn:

• What is back-office automation, and how can it supercharge your business?
• Back-office automation software for offline communications
• Back-office automation compliance program: why automation can help you abide by the law

What Is Back Office Automation, and How Can It Supercharge Your Business?

The back office is the part of a company that performs all supportive operations happening behind the scenes. These teams are not facing customers directly but do everything necessary to enable the front office to perform its functions.

Back-office automation uses automation software to upgrade antiquated processes, including HR practices, record keeping, IT, and inventory management. It enables companies to unite multiple operations within a single well-coordinated system to optimize management and provide seamless support to everything on the front-end.

Example. Since financial institutions work with an impressive volume of big data, they are actively switching to automation solutions. At the back office, they minimize manual document rendering, shift to electronic check records, and structure customer data for automated marketing campaigns. Banks also widely use the latest software solutions to launch automated workflows and automatically assign tasks to the right person.

Such back-office automation steps are always aligned with front office optimization and directly improve its performance. For instance, thanks to strengthening the back office, a customer can quickly process the payment at a bank terminal, instantly access their data through online banking, always receive online and offline communications in time, and more.

Why Is Back-Office Automation Essential for Modern Businesses?

If we still haven’t inspired you to start implementing intelligent automation by now, you should consider its business benefits. Back-office automation is an effective strategic decision because it:

• Reduces costs. It’s one of the primary reasons why business owners invest in back-office automation and automation compliance. Once a back-office operation is automated, you no longer need to pay for manually completing it. According to McKinsey’s digital research, the recently presented technology can automate up to 45% of activities people are paid for. Apart from this, since back-office automation enhances customer experience, you will also increase the income by attracting new leads.
• Increases efficiency. 13% of workers believe that repetitive tasks are a waste of time. Well, they are right. Back-office automation allows employees to focus on more critical money-making decisions freeing them from routine operations and saving time. Since the performance of all teams increases, the whole organization also starts yielding better results.
• Optimizes human hours. From 10% to 20% of business hours are spent on dull tasks that can be easily automated. Hence, through back-office automation, your business gets additional human resources and increases job satisfaction among employees.
• Helps to stay competitive on the market. On average, businesses are wasting 50% of automation opportunities. Therefore, the more robotic process automation you implement, the more favorable market position you can get.

These are only the most prominent business advantages resulting from general back-office automation. Each time you optimize a specific process, you will see a unique set of benefits. Let’s see how back-office automation works for offline communications and automation compliance below.

Back-Office Automation Software for Offline Communications

In some industries, offline communications are fundamental. Finances, utilities, and healthcare fields are just a few of them. Such organizations continuously need to deliver invoices, bills, credit card statements, notices, privacy policy updates, and other communications in printed and digital forms. The management and fulfillment of these operations load their internal resources and slow down both the back and front desk.

With innovative software for offline communications like Inkit, you can simultaneously automate back and front office operations related to document rendering, data validation, mail printing and delivery. Such automation for offline communications can:

• Collect data about customers and their behaviors across different communication channels in one place. Once the data is recorded, the tool cleans it, validates the obtained information, segments, and formats it. This simplifies data processing for other on-site systems and provides disparate teams with a unified customer view.

• Automatically pull customer information from the connected database to render custom PDF documents. These files are stored in the system for automation compliance and can be further delivered to specific recipients via digital channels or offline communications. If you need to deliver something via direct mail, printing, shipment, and tracking are also covered by the mail automation software. This helps your operational departments avoid getting engaged in routine, repetitive tasks and improves their performance.

• Inkit’s mail automation software supports hundreds of integrations with third-party tools for digital advertising, analytics, customer service, and online marketing. Thanks to such integration capabilities, you can securely connect your back-office operations with customer-facing activities. For example, you can integrate Inkit with SMS and push notification software to synchronize your offline communications and online notices. As a result, when a customer ignores your SMS notices, you will reach them with a print call-to-action or vice versa. Inkit instantly updates customer data and automatically delivers marketing communications depending on the real-time situation. This makes your marketing efforts better targeted since the marketing strategies are driven with the same data.

The mentioned capabilities don’t only prove the power of back-office automation. They also show that offline communications delivered to customers and everything that happens off-stage are closely interrelated. To run effective online and offline marketing communications campaigns, you will have to start with the back-office.

Back-Office Automation Compliance: How Automation Can Help You Abide by Law

Today, it’s hard to imagine a business that doesn’t process customer data. Each time you record a customer’s name at trade shows and store it in your system, send a marketing email, deliver offline communications to a specific address, you deal with personal information and customer’s privacy protected by law. This makes you subject to a range of international and local regulations, such as GDPR, Federal Trade Commissions Acts, and others.

By using automated tools for back-office optimization, you align your business operations with legal compliance requirements more efficiently. Most of them have built-in automation compliance that allows you to meet the most stringent standards. For example, when Inkit renders offline communications for mail delivery, it always stores a digital copy of the document for security and automation compliance purposes. This direct mail automation compliance tool also tracks all mailings to provide you with a proof of delivery if you need it.

These are just a few examples of how back-office optimization services boost automation compliance processes. If you want to know how Inkit can optimize the back office in your case, don’t forget to contact us for a talk.