Tag: digital technology

Ep. 31 The Power of Coaching in Building Employee Loyalty

Posted on by Bernie Borges

This week’s guest is Ingrid Ceballos. Ingrid has an impressive 16-year career journey at iQor, personifying employee loyalty and the coaching culture that makes iQor a leading employer in the BPO industry. She began her career with iQor as a call center agent and progressed through different roles as a direct benefit from the coaching she received and accepted throughout her tenure. Today she runs the iQor center in South Florida. Her scope of responsibility includes guiding more than 100 work-in-office and work-at-home employees’ performance and well-being as well as P&L responsibility for a client customer-care program. In this episode, we discuss the role that coaching has played in her career journey and the role coaching still plays for Ingrid as the Director of Operations at her site. 

Ingrid’s career at iQor began sixteen years ago as a call center agent. She enjoyed talking to customers from around the country and excelled at building customer loyalty by responding to their needs. Her talents were quickly recognized, and she was promoted to senior agent. In that role, she was responsible for supporting fellow employees with complex customer service situations, improving employee performance and loyalty. Her journey continued along a career path that led her to serve as a call center supervisor and as a member of the training and quality departments. Her well-rounded experience in all facets of managing the success of contact center agents and cultivating engaged employees led her to advance to her current position.

Director of Operations in South Florida

As Director of Operations in South Florida Ingrid has to understand the client’s products, how they message in the market, and what the customer expectations are as well as many other characteristics of the client’s go-to-market strategy. She runs the day-to-day operations of her center based on the iQorian values she embodies. She ensures that the client’s KPIs are met to achieve the client’s goals and objectives. She also places a high priority on supporting her fellow iQor employees, improving their engagement, loyalty, and performance. She refers to her team as her work family, a sentiment that carries over in all that she does for her employees.

Leadership Perspective

Ingrid’s leadership perspective is shaped by her tenure and education. Her strategies extend beyond managing results to include supporting the foundational elements that make success possible. She views herself as having three client categories: 1) the iQor client whose customer-care program she oversees, 2) iQor (her employer), and 3) her team of employees (agents, supervisors, trainers, etc.). She maintains this perspective in all her decision making.

Coaching has played a significant role in Ingrid’s career development and advancement. In fact, she attributes the coaching culture at iQor to being the most influential factor in employee loyalty as well as her own career advancement. She sees it as an essential component to growth in any career, from iQor to professional sports.

Ingrid expresses gratitude for all the team members that coached her during her formative years. She considers them a mix of helpers, mentors, and teachers. She vividly recalls how valuable coaching was during her time as a call center agent, guiding her on how to provide superior service on customer calls. She relied on the advice she received with an open mind and implemented it in her work. Not surprisingly, her leadership style exemplifies her mission to ensure that all agents have coaches available to them to provide balanced feedback. Indeed her track record shows that coaching supports employee development and sustains strong employee engagement, loyalty, and retention.

To this end, Ingrid’s commitment to continually strengthen her ability to best support her clients prompted her to complete external leadership development training and participate in iQor’s leadership development program to develop her coaching skills. She celebrates when employees on her team get promoted–a direct benefit of the coaching they received on their own journey. She acknowledges how coaching can help those around her in their own career advancement.

Digital Technology to Support the Power of Coaching

Ingrid revels in the role that coaching technology plays in performance management, providing real-time information and analytics to help supervisors coach employees on the frontlines of customer service for iQor’s client programs. iQor’s speech analytics technology – VALDI – enables supervisors to listen to agents’ calls and study the words that were used along with the tone of the conversation. VALDI provides insight to help coaches better understand how words are being used when resolving customer concerns. It empowers coaches with timely data to inform and guide their coaching conversations with their employees, playing into individual strengths and areas for improvement. These coaching tools and strategies directly benefit employee engagement and loyalty.

Coaching for Education and Growth

Committed to lifelong learning and growth, Ingrid has earned three college degrees during her 16-year career with iQor. The company culture and human resources initiatives at iQor provided a multitude of support to Ingrid over the eight years it took to complete her degrees. Her internal coaches guided her to find balance between school and work. Through this, she was able to adjust her schedule so she could continue working while taking classes in the mornings and evenings. Moreover, iQor’s tuition reimbursement program provided great assistance to Ingrid throughout her eight-year education journey.

Reflecting on her own growth and opportunities, Ingrid encourages iQorians to embrace and implement feedback in their own career journeys. She says that feedback is a well-intentioned gift that opens the door to opportunity. She recommends taking action on feedback that is received consistently, pointing out that if feedback is provided more than once on a particular topic, it probably has merit and should be acted upon. On the flip side, she also encourages leaders to mentor others to become a better version of themselves. Through teamwork the possibilities are endless.

What Ingrid Does for Fun

When Ingrid is not working, she enjoys the meditative nature of planting cacti and watching them grow. She considers herself a foodie and has embraced her inner-chef during pandemic times, experimenting with different recipes. She also enjoys playing with her four-year-old son.

Learn more about iQor digital customer experience capabilities.

Ep. 29 Digital Transformation Starts with Customer Experience

Posted on by Bernie Borges

Your Customer is on Their Own Digital Transformation Journey

This week’s guest is Howard Tiersky, Wall Street Journal best-selling author and founder and CEO of FROM, The Digital Transformation Agency. His latest book is Winning Digital Customers – The Antidote to Irrelevance.  IDG says that Howard is “One of The Top 10 Digital Transformation Influencers to Follow Today.” The Digitally Irresistible podcast is focused on the integration of digital technology and customer experience. Hence, this episode features Howard’s thought leadership on the premise that digital transformation starts with customer experience.

Howard began his career in theater and quickly got involved in the technology side of production. He became immersed in it and soon found himself consulting for businesses in the 1990s on digital strategies. Over the last twenty years, he has consulted with companies such as Airbus, GE, GM, Office Depot, NBC, JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and others guiding them in their digital transformation strategy.

Howard says that today’s most successful companies are aligned with their customer’s digital transformation. He observes this across several industries in his client base with patterns common across large enterprises that are challenged in driving transformation.

A Proven Approach to Digital Transformation

Howard says his approach is not the only approach to successful digital transformation, but it is proven to work. It starts with a binary perspective of the challenge.  

The first layer starts with understanding that your customer is undergoing a digital transformation of their own. All consumers have an increasingly digital lifestyle. We shop, plan vacations, and connect with friends digitally.

The other layer is internal. Every business needs to know how to transform to stay relevant to the customer. About fifteen years ago, Sears was the number one retailer in the U.S., representing 1% of GDP. Today Sears has just a few hundred stores compared to more than 30,000 stores in the height of their glory. Sears didn’t adapt to the changing behavior of their customer fast enough. This layer is about understanding how to be more relevant to your customer. That’s why the subtitle of his book is The Antidote to Irrelevance.

What is Meant by The Customer Experience?

The customer experience is everything the customer experiences when they interact with your brand. It starts with your marketing. Customers see your ads, pass by your store, hear about you from a friend, read a review, and use your website or your mobile app. Everything a customer does in the context of your product or service gives them a reason to interact. The entire customer journey is often made up of many touchpoints, some of which you can control and some you cannot. Howard says that improving the customer experience is the single most important thing any business can do to impact success.

Omnichannel Customer Experience

We know the biggest trend in customer experience is the use of digital channels to interact with the brands they buy from, often referred to as the omnichannel customer experience. Howard’s book explains the “strategic customer experience model.”

The model enables executives to architect the customer experience in a manner that explains why it’s important to the business to get the funding needed to deliver ROI in CX. It explains how the customer experience delivers business results.

The model answers the question what difference does customer experience make to the business? Start by looking at your company’s revenue and profit goals. Then, examine what are the causes of the results? Consider how we can get customers to behave the way we want them to behave to create the results we seek.  

The Psychology of Customer Behavior

Customer behavior is driven by the same two things that drive human behavior: thoughts and feelings. We’re all consumers. We think we need a product to meet a need and we consider how it makes us feel when the need is met. The business strategy tied to this psychology is to determine what are the thoughts and feelings our customers have that influence their behavior with our business?

If you can create experiences that produce the thoughts and feelings which result in the behavior that results in the purchase outcome we seek, we stay relevant with the customer and enjoy success. For example, homeowners need insurance to protect against catastrophic events such as fire or inclement weather. A common feeling associated with a homeowner’s insurance policy is peace of mind.

It takes research to determine the thoughts and feelings of your customer. For example, if you’re a provider of homeowner’s insurance, research what thoughts people have about companies in this space. Research what emotions they feel when planning to purchase homeowner’s insurance. Once you have completed research, the creative process begins to produce ideas to influence those thoughts and feelings and test them to learn how they impact the customer’s behavior.

When the people who make these decisions determine which touchpoints influence the customer’s behavior this insight has the potential to drive the desired business results.

Maximizing the Opportunity

Your customer research should also help you understand where the customer experiences friction in their journey with your brand. It’s critical that stakeholders internalize the importance of customer experience to achieve the company’s goals. Embracing proven practices such as design thinking and agile dev-ops can enable companies to go from understanding customer behavior to creating the kind of experiences that customers desire. New ideas should be tested.

Howard points out that companies are made up of people and they need to have the right people on board through good hiring and training on practices such as services-based architecture, design thinking, and agile dev-ops.

Howard’s book: Winning Digital Customers – The Antidote to Irrelevance is available wherever you buy books. You can download a free chapter at his website: https://winningdigitalcustomers.com/

Howard’s Passion for Scuba Diving

What Howard does for fun is adventurous. He is an avid scuba diver. He has five kids, most of whom follow in his footsteps. His 19-year-old is certified and has traveled the world with him to explore deep waters. He describes scuba diving as “flying underwater.” That’s a transformative experience of its own.  

Learn more about iQor’s digital customer experience capabilities.

Ep. 28 The Three Pillars of Digital Transformation in the Customer Experience

Posted on by Bernie Borges

Keeping the Agent at the Center of Digital Transformation in Customer Experience

Today’s featured guest is Tarn Shant, Senior Vice President, Transformation and Governance at iQor. Tarn leads a team of digital customer experience experts, engineers, and security analysts focused on building out the technology infrastructure by which iQor delivers outsourced customer services for our clients.

Tarn has been in the BPO industry for more than twenty years. He began his career as an agent handling customer phone calls. This background inspires Tarn to keep the agent at the center of the conversation when planning technologies that enable them to deliver great customer service.

As Tarn’s career has progressed, he’s held different roles achieving a Certified Black Belt Six Sigma along the way. Many of his roles were business-centric responsibilities while leading large-scale operations. About seven years ago he got the opportunity to move into technology, which he embraced.

Earlier in 2021, Tarn was heading up infrastructure and operations technology. Around the middle of 2021, he got the opportunity to lead transformation and governance. His team is devoted to helping customers optimize the CX experience for their end customers.

iQor’s Approach to Digital Experience Transformation

Tarn’s team is focused on deploying technology that results in a great customer experience along with a happy and productive contact center agent. Their approach to building CX technology is built on these three pillars.

Call Deflection

This entails creating an end customer experience that is as effective as possible through self-service to reduce the chance of a customer calling to speak with an agent to resolve simple questions such as “where is my shipment?” This can be achieved through intelligent automation such as IVR technology, chatbots, in-app messaging, etc. The result is a great experience for the end customer that also benefits the agent by resolving simple questions before they get to an agent through a voice call. This allows agents to get more fulfillment from their customer interaction by helping them solve more complex issues.

Digitization of the infrastructure that enables the CX experience.

Tarn is extremely proud of the iQor private CX cloud. It provides stability and scalability that delivers great value for our clients and for our business.

He explains further that we are moving toward a hybrid cloud that enables us to choose workloads that can be executed better in a public cloud, and keep certain workloads on our private cloud, within our data centers. We are accelerating the hybrid cloud model because it’s paying dividends for our clients.

The Agent Experience

Every decision we make considers the impact on the contact center agent. We ask how will this technology impact the agent? It starts with the hiring process.

Once an agent is hired, the onboarding process is all about training the agent. There are technologies that help agents train faster, reducing their learning curve. Once training is completed, the focus is ensuring that we enable them to perform well. Agents want to be productive, meeting the KPIs established by and for our clients.

Agents benefit from tools such as chatbots, knowledge management tools, speech analytics and AI-powered coaching as well as feedback from their supervisors. The combination of these tools and the human supervisor element enables our agents to perform at a high level of performance and job satisfaction.

The iQor Differentiator is Speed and Security

Tarn points out that successful execution comes down to speed and security. When it comes to speed, he shares an example of a client who had a need to stand up 500 agents in 7 days. Due to our established technology infrastructure coupled with our robust and proven recruiting processes, we got it done, much to the thrill of the client.

Naturally, clients want to know that our customer care service delivery is secure. In today’s hybrid CX delivery model where some frontline staff are located in an iQor facility and others are work-at-home agents, security is paramount. Tarn explains our approach to data security is partnering with best-of-breed partners such as Palo Alto Networks, CrowdStrike, NICE and Thinscale to deliver endpoint security that scales.

He ensures that his staff gets proper training, so they are up to speed on the technology ensuring effective deployment of secure CX service delivery regardless of an agent’s location. Collaboration with our partner’s security team ensures the right controls are in place for us to deliver highly secure customer service to our client’s end customers.

Balancing People with The Technology Infrastructure

Another element that exists as a layer above the four pillars is change management. As technology is planned, Tarn works closely with his team to ensure that cultural change is inclusive so that everyone is part of the common story.

For Tarn, it’s always been about people, making sure everyone understands what they are trying to achieve. People ask is each technology initiative aligned to the company goals? Investing in people’s skills development, giving them the proper tools and an environment where they can share their ideas and flourish is an important part of the culture. He regularly reaches out to frontline staff to have skip-level meetings to give them an opportunity to be heard.

Another important consideration is technology training. Whenever we sign up for a new technology, we ensure the partner offers training directly or through an authorized partner to train our team.

What Tarn Does for Fun

Tarn started playing tennis for exercise and fun during COVID. Since he lives in the northeastern U.S. where outdoor tennis is not available six months of the year, he also enjoys going for long walks and listening to podcasts to stay up-to-date on topics of interest.

Learn more about iQor digital customer experience capabilities.

Ep. 9 The Trust Building Imperative in BPO Industry Sales Success

Posted on by Blake Graves

Experience Drives Trust-Building in the BPO Industry

Troy Sanders has been very successful in his sales career at iQor. Troy’s career includes an extensive background in professional services, marketing, sales, and operations. He credits trust building as the biggest factor to his success in sales in the BPO industry. In this episode, we examine Troy’s strategy that has fueled his success.

Troy began his career at AT&T, where he spent fifteen years in various roles. One such role was procurement, where he was responsible for selecting and managing relationships with outsourcing partners who provide outsourced customer service, direct response, and direct fulfillment services. At the time, Troy was working with an outsourcing partner named Interactive Response Technologies (IRT). Troy considered the quality of the people and services delivered by IRT to be the best in the industry. When iQor acquired IRT, he got the chance to learn more about the company, culture, and service offerings. He decided to join iQor to represent those services in the market as Vice President of Business Development.

Secret Sauce to Sales Success

Troy has been successful in his sales role at iQor because of his ability to build trust with clients. Many of the people Troy interacts with are in positions he has previously held in his career. Consequently, Troy has the knowledge and skills to understand what it takes to enhance his client’s end-customer experience. In short, he’s walked in their shoes, so he understands the scope of work needed to design customer care solutions that meet his client’s needs.

Teamwork in BPO Sales

Troy acknowledges that CX technology and the family-like culture at iQor are a great recipe for team selling and support. It starts with senior leadership and transcends throughout the organization and to frontline employees serving as the voice of the customer. He attributes this culture to great communication across the organization that drives smiles and happy customer experiences supported by processes and tools that make agents effective at their job.

Bringing All the Experience Together

Troy works with clients such as big-box retailers and emergency road assistance brands. He leverages his background and experience to create efficient solutions that include self-help options such as digital IVR and speech analytics that help agents understand the customer’s sentiment.  Ultimately, Troy designs efficient CX solutions to drive a good customer experience, ranging from self-help to a live phone conversation with an agent to answer the end customer’s specific questions.

Digital Solutions for Call Center Agents

The digital CX solutions available to agents at iQor begin with design thinking from the voice of the customer first. These solutions make agents more efficient and happier. Digital tools reduce some of the labor effort needed to make the end-customer happy through intelligent automation such as AI that can help the agent ask the right questions or RPA that reduces the workload of mundane tasks. These result in happier frontline employees, which Troy refers to as brand specialists. These tools enable them to feel good about their job, which creates more smiles all the way around.

Looking to the Future

Troy is looking forward to the continued impact of digital interaction on contact center agent’s ability to drive efficiency and drive cost down in the client’s business. By giving our clients more self-help options in customer care delivery, we can deflect calls, reduce costs, and still provide the end-customer the option of speaking to an agent when needed.

Troy’s Fun

Troy lives in Fort Lauderdale, FL. It’s no surprise that he enjoys boating, fishing, and just about anything that keeps him out in the sun.

Learn more about iQor digital customer experience capabilities.