front office

English

Noun

front office (plural front offices)

1. An office which members of the general public can contact or consult when dealing with an organization.
   • 2014, Steffen Jacobsen, Trophy, →ISBN:

     She had introduced herself to an elderly, shapeless secretary in the front office, but wasn't convinced that the woman had heard her.

   • 2014, Jim Auton, The Secret Betrayal of Britain's Wartime Allies, →ISBN, page 76:

     A woman in the front office invited me to wait in the director's office.

   • 2015, Monica Helene Thomas, I'll Never Amount to Nothing So You Say, →ISBN:

     While Nathan took his time walking toward the front office to get a tardy slip, he got a text message on his cellphone from his mother.

2. The systems or divisions of an organization that deal with customer or public interactions or revenue generation.
   • 2014, Raghurami Reddy Etukuru, Enterprise Risk Analytics for Capital Markets, →ISBN, page 335:

     The demand for real-time risk calculations and regulatory capital optimization enables the traditional risk management functions to be integrated into the front office to involve them in the decision-making process.

   • 2015, Andrew Palmer, Smart Money, →ISBN, page 64:

     The front office sells and sells; the back office struggles to cope.

3. The executive or policymaking officers of an organization.
   • 2014, Oliver North, Bob Hamer, Counterfeit Lies, →ISBN, page 119:

     Any good undercover agent ruffled a few feathers in the front office, and Jake more often than not upset the entire henhouse.

   • 2015, Andrew Baggarly, Duane Kuiper, A Band of Misfits: Tales of the 2010 San Francisco Giants, →ISBN, page 12:

     Sabean insisted he kept Posey at Triple A because the front office wasn't convinced the rookie could excel behind the plate in the big leagues.

Coordinate terms

• back office
• middle office

Adjective

front office (not comparable)

1. Pertaining to the portion of a business or organization that deals with customers and revenue generation.
   • 2014, Tanya Bondarouk, Shared Services as a New Organizational Form, →ISBN, page 159:

     The primary function of the transactional HR SSC is the performance of the back- and front-office functions and processes through deployment of the operational service delivery capabilities.

   • 2015, Driss Kettani, Bernard Moulin, E-Government for Good Governance in Developing Countries, →ISBN:

     The eFez Project aimed at automating the back office operations (through the digitization of all the BEC's records into a database) and enabling electronic front office service delivery through a multilingual (i.e., Classical Arabic, Moroccan dialect, Berber and French), multichannel (i.e., web, GSM, self-service kiosk and conventional desk service) and multimodal (i.e., vocal instructions, text messaging, etc.) interface.