front office

plural front offices

1. An office where members of the general public can contact or consult when dealing with an organization.

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

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

   2 more examples

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

   2014, Steffen Jacobsen, Trophy, →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.

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

2. attributivefigurativelyoftenThe systems or divisions of an organization that deal with customer or public interactions or revenue generation.

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

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

   3 more examples

   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.

   2014, Raghurami Reddy Etukuru, Enterprise Risk Analytics for Capital Markets, →ISBN, page 335

   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.

   2014, Tanya Bondarouk, Shared Services as a New Organizational Form, →ISBN, page 159

   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.

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

3. The executive or policymaking officers of an organization.

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

   2014, Oliver North, Bob Hamer, Counterfeit Lies, →ISBN, page 119

   1 more example

   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.

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