Why we created a Back Office Support team

We recently created a Back Office Support team within the company to provide support to the other teams and enable them to deliver the best possible service as we had reached a point where teams were overwhelmed with the demand of the workload, so BOS have taken on the role of doing the valuations for all the teams. Each team had always done their own valuations until this point, and we have never outsourced it. It is so important to us that we deliver the best possible service to our clients and creating this team helps our overall service be more efficient.

Our Practice Manager, Kerry Burgess, stated: “The Back Office Support team was created off of the back of an employee engagement survey, whereby we asked the team to confirm to us what were the barriers to the team being able to carry out their roles efficiently, and the number one response was the impact in time wasted and the inefficiencies of the providers when collating investment and client information either due to a valuation report being required for an annual review, or for collating information relating to a new client. We started by drawing out a plan of what tasks could we move to a non-client facing role and what sort of skills, knowledge and experience might an individual need to carry out those duties.

Many of our Client Relationship Managers are either now level 4 Diploma qualified or working towards that level, and this makes carrying out the more general administration duties far more costly to be carried out at this level. Our Back Office Support team did not require any previous experience or qualifications in this area but were required to have an eye for detail and the patience for taking the time to collate the information required.

As a business manager, I placed the emphasis on the role being 100% home based, except for the requirement to attend our quarterly company updates, as again being a London-based firm, having people coming into the office costs them money in travel expenses and also the business with needing sufficient space to accommodate a larger team. By offering a flexible working role, we can keep costs down as a business, but still be able to offer employment to somebody who maybe otherwise would not have been able to take the role if they were unable to be in London every day.

It just so happens that the two ladies we brought into the team are both mothers, who for them working from home provided the perfect balance of being able to earn a higher level of income that would otherwise have been the case with a part-time role, but still have the flexibility to work around their commitments of having a young family.’

Zoe Raynsford has been with the business for 15 years and was made Head of Back Office Support when the team was created. As someone who knows the business well, she was an ideal person to head up BOS and ensure that the service is delivered to the highest possible standard to relieve workload of teams and also improve the services being delivered. She is home based most of the time and travels to London one day a week to work in the office.

Regarding the creation of BOS, Zoe states “We are futuristic financial planners, and we constantly find ways to look ahead and improve.

We take great pride in the services we provide, and we created our new Back Office Support Department to ensure that we are operating as effectively as possible. We are a growing business, and we knew the point would come when we would have to create this department. Having the support of this new team enables all the other teams to spend more time on their clients work and those relationships.

It was advertised as a home working role to include people who wanted that fluidity. As the team is made up of working mums, flexible working enables us to do the school run in the morning and afternoon then finish work later and pick up where we left off. Our children are only young once and it is amazing to have an improved work/life balance because of flexible working.

I feel that the pandemic has pushed everyone to communicate better and more efficiently using technology and this compliments the Back Office Support team working remotely and still delivering the best possible service. The department will expand and evolve to continue taking the pressure off client facing members of the team and allow them to deliver the best possible service to clients which is always our aim as business.”

We look forward to watching this team grow as we continually improve and evolve as a business.

This document is marketing material for a retail audience and does not constitute advice or recommendations. Past performance is not a guide to future performance and may not be repeated. The value of investments and the income from them may go down as well as up and investors may not get back the amount originally invested.