What is a Back Office Job?

The past decade has seen industries fall for digitization, AI and machine learning, but not radically. Still, there are back office jobs, resonating with industrial requirements. These are trending, topping up to the list of profitability and revenue over and over.

In short, they are evergreen jobs with a massive scope of supporting administration and human resources, which makes it a good job. Simply say, these jobs do not involve active client interaction.

Back Office Vs Front Office

Difference	Back Office Work	Front Office Work
Definition	The work wherein administrative support is required and where client communication does not come at first is back office work.	Front office work is opposite to back office work, involving active client servicing.
Customer Involvement	Passive involvement	Active participation
Account To	Administrative function, HR governance and compliance management	Strategy development
Core	Manufacturing products and operating services	Increase upselling & cross selling, appraising demands
Responsibility	Carry out daily administrative tasks and roles	Dot around sales and marketing and retargeting
Salary	As per role; Generally, it is lower than the front office workers	It spans across creating opportunities for sales and marketing. Therefore, it is worth for higher pay scale.
Focus Area	Cost Cutting	Multiplying revenue
Interactions	In-bound interactions with IT management, finance, accounting and warehousing teams	Interaction with clients

Types of back office works:

• Settlements, as in insurance companies and recovery services
• Clearances
• Record/ data management
• Regulatory compliance
• Accounting
• Abstracting and indexing
• Call centres
• Data capture and processing
• Data warehousing
• Electronic publishing
• Legal transcription
• Litigation support
• Mailing list management
• Medical records management
• Medical transcription
• Remote secretarial services
• Technical writing
• Telemarketing
• Teleservices
• Web site design and management

Key skills for back office executives:
The designation defines what key skills the back office executive should possess. But sill, there are a few ones that an entrepreneur looks for in common. They are:

1. Data management capabilities: The executive is primarily engaged in collecting, authenticating, preparing and formatting the content so that the front-end could strongly take-up the clients-dealing.
2. Processing for projects: An order management executive in the backend, for example, has to thoroughly examine and make entries of products. Then, he should prompt the shipping company as well as the customer through emailing. In short, the executive should know the process, which he is going to carry out specifically.
3. Analysis: Having an analytical aspect is very important. Whatever task he is going to take on, analyzing it at first is essential to restrain from a big roll down.
4. Market research: The market research is a broad spectrum, which encompasses through analyzing market trends, knowing behavior and predicting the trends. It helps in taking good decisions as the future course of action.
5. Finance and accounting: Knowing about billing, invoicing, ticketing and validating cheques or other financial transactions is mandatory for those who aspire to join finance and accounting jobs. 

The organisations hire skilled back office executives at the salary package that matches with the profile.

How does it work?
Back office works are mainly dotted around the administrative and support personnel. Despite being seemingly invisible, it consistently helps in regulating administrative and operational tasks. The back office staff contributes its efficacies and energy according to designated profiles, which are classified under ‘operations’ or ‘administration’ or ‘manufacturing’. The aforementioned works passively concrete the status of front office staff. It gets the platform to navigate to the clients with the least of efforts.

Sometimes, the back office jobs are taken as an indirect revenue generating factors. Despite being no direct communication with clients, this staff frequently proves its presence through associate crucial roles in the backend.

Challenges 
Like its upshots, there are many challenges that devalue its role.

1. Training costs: Missing out on the required education and skills can prove dangerous. Like front office workers, the back office staff should be qualified enough to meet the job purpose. Unfortunately, not all are an acquaint of customers’ dynamics. So, they are trained to sharpen and enhance their competencies, which certainly involves a big spend. For small entrepreneurs, it’s a burden.
2. Inefficiency: Every error counts to inefficiencies. The work like data entry or data processing involves is utterly prone to errors. Here, automation can save the chances of errors. Besides, the organisation will have opportunities via automation to redirect its energy to other vital tasks. 
3. Incentivizing is a key: Incentivizing is a key to boost morale of all. Like anyone, the back office workers should be given attention and accolades for going some extra miles. But, many organisations miss it out. Consequently, they work with discouraged soul, which often disappoints revenue and capabilities.
4. Automation is inevitable: As aforementioned, automation can be seen in every niche and nook. The upshot of being speedy, error-free and frictionless is making it a new normal in every domain. But, there are many organisations that still follow the paper-bound back office work. The shifting to being digital is by far a big deal.
5. Cumbersome process: It is tedious to carry out a work and then pass through multiple touches, such as copy-pasting data and then, reviewing it over and over. The cases like this are burdensome for a normal human being to juggle with. The repetitive data entries might mess the quality.