Definition of "front office"

front office

noun
plural front offices
1. An office to which members of the general public go when dealing with an organization.
  Quotations
  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
  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, page 76
  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
2. The systems or divisions of an organization that deal with customer or public interactions and/or revenue generation.
  Quotations
  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, page 335
  The front office sells and sells; the back office struggles to cope.
  2015, Andrew Palmer, Smart Money, page 64
3. The executive or policymaking officers of an organization.
  Quotations
  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, page 119
  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, page 12
adjective
not comparable
1. Pertaining to the portion of a business or organization that deals with customers and revenue generation.
  Quotations
  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, 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