Front office
The front office is the part of an organization that deals with customer contact. A front office may consist of a physical store or customer counter, a department that interacts with customers by phone or Internet, and possibly representatives who visit customers.
The term front office is derived from the traditional layout of commercial buildings, where customer contact occurs at the front and support departments (the back office) are located at the back. However, both sides of an organization need not be physically in the same location.
The front office and back office are often connected by accessing or linking cash register and order systems to central back office systems, ICT applications surrounding a database in which customer data, orders, invoices, schedules and annual reports are stored.
