An empirical analysis of financial services processes with a front-office or back-office orientation

Abstract

In a departure from most other empirical studies of service organizations, this study employs a lower-level unit of analysis and explores service processes with front-office or back-office orientations. Moreover, unlike past studies, no front-office process has a corresponding back-office process in our sample. The analysis of unrelated front-office and back-office processes offers a more rigorous examination of the customer contact model. The findings by and large support the premise of this model for breaking up the activities involved in a service delivery process. Our most surprising finding relates to the levers for achieving outstanding performance. The best performers among the processes with a front-office orientation emphasize capital investment, while the best performers among those with a back-office orientation embrace higher degrees of labor intensity. It appears that in order to achieve its superior performance, each process type adopts an additional design characteristic commonly attributed to the opposite process type.