This section covers commonly asked and expert level Back Office Interview questions and answers. The types of questions covered are general, conceptual, behavioral, situational and experience based. You can also find interesting examples and sample answers with each question.
Who are these Back Office Interview Questions useful for?
These back office interview questions will be very useful for all candidates appearing for the role of back office executive, admin, assistant, manager in domains like banking, data entry or any other. Both freshers and experiened candidates will be benefited by these questions and answers.
1. What is a Back Office?
Answer:
The back office of a company is that part of the business which houses employees taking care of administrative and support tasks. These employees do not need to come directly in contact with the customers but are the ones who form the back bone of the company and help in running the show smoothly.
For e.g. In a finance or banking company, professionals taking care of managing and settling the accounts, clearing the payments, updating the accounts records, running the IT infrastructure, data entry, human resources are the back office employees.
The back office does not generate the revenue for the company but without its support the front office revenue generation team can't complete the deal.
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2. What is the difference between Front Office and Back Office?
Answer:
Front office is the team of people who come in direct contact with the customers. For e.g. the sales people, the customer support employees. These are the people who generate the revenue.
Back Office people are the people who do not come in direct contact with the customers. They work from back stage but when a sales person gets a deal, they are the ones to execute it and take it to consummation.
The two offices need to work hand in hand for the business to run smoothly.
3. What are the skills required to work in a Back Office?
Answer:
The skills required by Back Office personnel depend a lot on the role. But, since this team is the one working with the data and communicating the information with the front office people, they need to be technically good and possess excellent communication skills both oral and written. They have to be really good at coordinating with the front office team.
They should also know the business processes well to execute them effectively.
4. What do you know about mid office in a financial company?
Answer:
Between the front office and back office lies the mid office of a finance company. Mid office hosts the team of employees who calculate and manage the risks for the company. They calculate the profits and losses in every new deal and scheme. They are good mathematicians, statisticians and have the ability to harness the power of computers to deal with all the data. They possess good analytical abilities.
This team is not the revenue generator for the business but plays an extremely important role in conceiving the new schemes and giving the deals a go ahead.
5. Why do companies set up their back offices in slightly remote regions?
Answer:
Cost is usually the reason for the companies to set up their back offices remotely.
6. Is it only some of the back office activities that the companies outsource?
Answer:
The type of activities that a company outsources varies from business to business. If there's a particular activity in the back office that is important but not the core business of the company, they would consider outsourcing it. Similarly, some companies can even outsource some of their front office activities. For e.g. the initial process of Passport processing in India is outsourced because that is information collection. However, the back office is maintained by government because that is information verification which needs more control.
