Company: Blackhawk Network, Pleasanton CA
Company Description: Blackhawk Network delivers branded payment programs to help meet today’s most challenging business objectives. We collaborate with our partners to innovate, translating market trends in branded payments to extend reach, build loyalty and increase revenue. We offer a full portfolio of comprehensive services to ensure the success of our partners’ branded payment programs.
Nomination Category: Customer Service & Call Center Awards Individual Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Young Customer Service Professional of the Year - All Other Industries
 Nomination Title: Austin Botelho
- Which will you submit for your nomination in this category, a video of up to five (5) minutes, explaining the achievements since July 1, 2021 of the nominated woman, OR written answers to the questions? (Choose one):
Written answers to the questions
- If you are submitting a video of up to five (5) minutes in length, provide the URL of the video here, OR attach it to your entry via the "Add Attachments, Videos, or Links to This Entry" link above, through which you may also upload a copy of your video. If you are submitting written answers to the questions for this category, provide them in the spaces below.
- Briefly describe the nominated individual: history and past performance (up to 200 words):
Total 196 words used.
Austin has worked for Blackhawk for the last 5 years. He excelled as a call center agent, was promoted to an offline agent, and promoted again to Workforce Management. Austin is always looking for ways to improve any tasks he takes on and ensures all jobs are completed accurately and efficiently.
Austin’s curious nature allows him to thrive in our business; he never misses a chance to learn something new and then show the full team. He consistently displays the ability and tenacity to learn new skills and grow but does not rely on someone to show him. He takes the initiative to teach himself and then offers to teach anyone else who would want to know. This innovation and creativity have transformed the way our Workforce Management team works. He has developed processes, renovated reporting, and even assists in training to ensure a knowledgeable, cohesive team. He takes every one of his tasks head on, no matter how difficult of a task it is. Even though he is not in a leadership position, the entire team leans on him to help with any roadblocks or questions and Austin always makes time to help them out.
- Outline the nominee's achievements since July 1 2021 that you wish to bring to the judges' attention (up to 250 words):
Total 244 words used.
1. Revitalized reporting to ensure a clean, easy to view summary. Integrated many of our reports to ensure ultimate efficiency by linking them together, eliminating the need to re-enter information for each report.
2. Austin was tasked with creating reporting for our back-office team. This was no easy task as we had no reporting on that team and had not been immersed in the practices and metrics that the back-office team uses. Austin dove into the project and produced reliable, creative reporting that allowed not only Reno, but the full leadership team to be able to easily monitor and review all metrics and productivity.
3. Austin is consistently proving his innovation with every task he handles. He brought the Workforce team into a completely new way of reporting by introducing Power Bi reporting and dashboards to our team. This offers a fully functional reporting system that updates automatically (in most cases) and ensures ultimate efficiency as we do not have to manually update these reports daily.
4. Austin has also become the trainer of the team, ensuring that everyone is skilled and knowledgeable, allowing us to jump into any project and assist in dividing workload wherever needed.
5. Austin created all our financial scorecards, which assist our Financial Institution partners in keeping their finger on all metrics and ensure that our center does not accrue any penalties. This has aligned our center and saved finances by avoiding fines that we would have otherwise incurred.
- Explain why the achievements you have highlighted are unique or significant. If possible compare the achievements to the performance of other players in your industry and/or to the nominee's past performance (up to 250 words):
Total 248 words used.
In Workforce Management, it can be easy to get comfortable with your reporting, which causes you to stay within limitations already set. It is a lot of extra work (up front) to challenge the status quo and innovate your reporting to bring it to the next level. Austin went above and beyond even this by bringing an entirely new tool into our reporting process. This type of reporting is automated, which means we save the need for more employees by not having to manually fill out this report daily (which would take 2 people to do!).
Austin also had to not only create reporting for an entire line of business, but to learn the background of the business to be able to create the reporting needed. This assisted the entire team with being able to monitor/adjust outstanding tickets, unhappy customers, Incidents, etc. He went further by teaching the team everything he learned. This is essential as many times we are thrown projects that interfere with our daily tasks. We must be able to have an alternate person that can jump in and help without any time to train that employee, saving the company from paying hours of overtime and the employees with work burnout.
By creating the Financial Institution scorecards, Austin revealed when and where we are missing our metrics, then pulled essential levers to adjust before time ran out. This has saved us fees and has ensured that our partners are satisfied with the work being performed.
- Reference any attachments of supporting materials throughout this nomination and how they provide evidence of the claims you have made in this nomination (up to 250 words):
Total 237 words used.
Back-office forecast files: Austin created these files to monitor the difference between the headcount that we need, and the headcount that we currently have. This allows the center to pivot to ensure that we are not over/ understaffed and saves the company money when we are able to remove an employee or limit overtime by ensuring we have enough coverage.
BHN Case Management Dashboard: This dashboard automatically updates, which saves us time. It allows the business to see a full picture of all back-office teams. These dashboards allow you to drill down to lower-level information or review a higher summary of the dashboard. You can see what tickets are still open, out of service level, how many tickets have needed to be re-assigned, and even offer a view on our mail teams’ job responsibilities.
Executive Summary Dashboard: This is a dashboard that will assist leadership with monitoring the full back-office team. This dashboard has both higher level summaries and detailed views to ensure a full picture. This dashboard even goes as far as to incorporate alternate teams, Incidents, tasks, cases, etc. It depicts service level, cases/ tasks handled, average days to close a case, completion by priority, and so much more. If we were to use the old Excel method (instead of following Austin’s innovation), this would take days just to update a report as it has so many different reports that go into the one dashboard.
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