Ep. 36 Coaching and Analytics Propels Customer Service Team to Top Performer

Coaching and Analytics Improve the Customer Experience

This week’s guest is Adaeze Nwamah, iQor operations manager in Richardson, Texas. Her team of about 60 employees began a client program with a customer service focus. With the team’s tremendous success creating meaningful experiences throughout the customer journey, the parameters of the client program changed. Adaeze and her team embraced the opportunity to ramp up fast and achieved top-performing metrics in customer service and sales. In this episode, we learn Adaeze’s secret formula for utilizing coaching and analytics to attain top-performing status and high levels of customer satisfaction so rapidly.

A Leader’s Own Career Growth Guides Her Management Style

Adaeze began working at iQor five years ago as an agent. She has continually advanced her own career journey through hard work and performance excellence. She quickly progressed to senior agent and then became manager of social media monitoring, handling chat and web support for a client. Through her strong work experience and demonstrated accomplishments, she soon moved on to supervisor before landing her current role.

As operations manager in Richardson, Texas, Adaeze oversees a program for a client in the insurance industry and guides about 60 employees—agents, supervisors, quality analysts, a trainer, and a sales ambassador. She manages the day-to-day operations of the entire site, using tools, resources, and advanced analytics to meet or exceed the client’s key performance indicators (KPIs) throughout the customer journey.

Meeting Program Changes Through Strategic Employee Development

The initial scope of the program she oversees for the insurance industry client was to serve and solve through excellent customer service. Her team members focused on filing claims and building customer loyalty and relationships—it was a pure customer service model to ensure customer satisfaction throughout the claims process.

With her team providing such extraordinary customer service, the client decided to expand the program and the scope of the project changed as a result. It changed fast. Adaeze led her team to quickly pivot to the serve, solve, and sell model with high performance for customer service excellence.

In order to effectively introduce sales into their customer experience model, Adaeze’s team ramped up and embraced the opportunity to grow. With Adaeze’s enthusiasm and support for her team, everyone was excited about the new offerings. Her team participated in a three-week comprehensive training program to help agents better understand the new objectives for adding additional value to the customer through upselling and cross-selling an insurance product. The client was involved throughout the training process to ensure deep product knowledge and support the growth of sales leaders.

Further, the team also made sure the ongoing recruiting process was geared towards the new serve, solve, and sell focus, incorporating the new skill into talent acquisition efforts.

Through in-depth training with experienced agents and new recruits, the team learned 60 agent selling behaviors, from product knowledge to product positioning. They also deepened their sales knowledge to focus on the best lifestyle questions to ask along with other discovery techniques to better understand customer behavior and inform an effective sales approach through a connected digital customer experience.

Purposeful Analytics Inform Coaching and Development

At iQor, data analytics drives strategic customer initiatives. We take comprehensive measurements, interpret them in a disciplined and scientific way, and act on the results to drive excellence. Adaeze’s high-performing team was no different. They utilized iQor’s sQan data analytics program to enhance coaching and development. The program provides helpful insight by enabling supervisors to track coaching sessions to ensure their effectiveness and identify behaviors to reinforce or redirect.

sQan empowers supervisors with information to help guide agents towards the best behaviors to serve, solve, and sell effectively on customer calls. It also helps coaches employ strategies to help agents show empathy and engagement with the customer as part of a comprehensive approach to providing superior customer service. sQan is an essential component of ensuring agents receive the support they need to provide the best customer experience, especially when new program requirements, such as sales, are introduced.

Through another analytics reporting tool that tracks behaviors, sales numbers, customer service survey results, and quality results, coaches have easily accessible information in real-time to provide timely and specific coaching sessions differentiated to each agent’s needs. With access to helpful performance metrics, agents and coaches alike are excited to participate in the process and grow their customer experience capabilities from the training and coaching sessions.

Differentiated Coaching Meets Resounding Program Success

Through hard work, training, and development, Adaeze’s team has met incredible success. In 2021, they were recognized as the top-performing program nine out of 12 months when compared to six other internal contact center sites on the same program. For those months, Adaeze’s team was the number one program site for sales and customer service. The team’s determination and utilization of sQan has made for fantastic performance by all measures.

Adaeze is incredibly proud of her team and all the smiles they bring. She attributes their profound success to two things.

First, the effective utilization of resources. By using sQan alongside extensive learning and training opportunities, Adaeze’s team has embraced the resources available to them. They have incorporated them into their day-to-day experiences to ensure ongoing growth and development in order to create rewarding employee and customer experiences.

Second, divine discontent. Adaeze leads her team to see the positive in any situation. She views divine discontent as essential for growth. She says it’s being proud of oneself for where you are, while also perpetually seeking opportunities to grow and improve. It has worked for her team and has resulted in strong employee relationships. Every day, her team brings their work ethic and determination to do their best while striving to learn and grow more.

Adaeze’s leadership style creates smiles. She has led her team to Be More with iQor and to embrace new growth opportunities, achieving the recognition of number one site. Her commitment to training and ongoing self-improvement is inspiring. She makes it clear that if you work hard for it, anything is possible.

What Adaeze Does for Fun  

When not inspiring her team to be their best selves, Adaeze finds rewarding experiences through cooking and watching Disney movies. In fact, she probably loves Disney movies more than her kids do! Right now, her favorite is Encanto which has her singing those songs on repeat.

Learn more about iQor’s capabilities for amazing customer care.