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Company: Best Western International, Phoenix, AZ
Company Description: Best Western International, Inc., is a privately held hotel brand made up of more than 4,000* BEST WESTERN®, BEST WESTERN PLUS® and BEST WESTERN PREMIER® hotels in more than 100* countries and territories worldwide. Now celebrating 67 years of hospitality, Best Western welcomes hundreds of thousands of guests nightly.
Nomination Category: Customer Service & Call Center Awards Individual Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Customer Service Manager of the Year

Nomination Title: Daniel Guerrera, Customer Service Manager

Tell the story about what this nominee achieved since the beginning of July 2011 (up to 500 words). Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms. Be sure to mention obstacles overcome, innovations or discoveries made, and outcomes:

Daniel supervises the Best Western Rewards® customer service team. Under his leadership, the team achieved increased customer satisfaction and employee engagement. Daniel fosters an employee powered culture where agents are empowered to take care of the customers’ needs, increase first call resolution and focus on both customer and agent satisfaction. Best Western’s corporate vision is to provide each customer with superior customer care, and Daniel embodies that spirit in his daily efforts.

Daniel increased employee engagement by implementing an action team to focus on connecting individual contributions to organizational goals. This led to a 10 percent increase in year over year engagement scores. The team also built stronger internal relationships with marketing programs by focusing on increased communication and collaboration. This helped to push information to agents faster, improving engagement scores by 20 points in one year. Finally, Daniel introduced dynamic incentive programs for staff, built around customer and efficiency metrics, increasing recognition by 25 points on engagement surveys year over year.

In order to provide superior customer care, Daniel expanded the tool set for agents to be more effective. He did this by providing better work spaces with increased screen real estate. He partnered with the training team to redesign loyalty training modules, so that they were not only highly customer-centric but included stronger agent empowerment techniques.

Building on improving the customer experience, Daniel redesigned the agent quality evaluation form to focus on the following three elements of the customer:
1) Show me you care,
2) Respect my time, and
3) Resolve my issue.

He redesigned the call format analysis, improved team coaching and metrics, and helped reduce average handle time by 10 percent. This resulted in a $550,000 departmental cost savings, while still not sacrificing quality. His efforts have helped to lead to a 38 percent increase in customer engagement in loyalty programs through proactive communication techniques.

Daniel served as the business lead in the implementation of a new IVR (virtual agent), to allow a state of the art call handling experience that focused on self-service. This system reduced 20 percent of calls into the contact center, while increasing quality scores 11 percent in a single year. This integration has also allowed the business to dissect customer utterances and movement in the virtual space.

Daniel also led the effort to redesign our team’s employee scorecards, focusing on a balanced approach where efficiency is key, but not at the expense of the customer. This has helped each member of the team find value in providing exceptional customer experiences.

In the end, Daniel has a “Service Above All” customer-centered mentality. His authentic and values-based servant leadership style has increased relationship building at all levels and has fostered greater partnerships throughout the Best Western organization. He creates the right environment for employees to feel comfortable, while increasing their ability to reach new performance peaks.

This honor will help us show Daniel that his efforts have improved the customer and employee experience, and that we appreciate his daily efforts to live our corporate vision.

Provide a brief (up to 100 words) biography about the nominee:

Daniel Guerrera started his career in 1994 working for AAA as a customer service representative while attending Sonoma State University. During his 16 year career he grew both horizontally and vertically serving many different areas in the contact center organization. This included leading their west coast road service operation, eBusiness team and Insurance Sales unit selling in over 18 states. In August of 2011, Daniel joined Best Western International® were he serves as Manager of the Best Western Rewards® Customer Service team at their North American contact center in Phoenix, Arizona. His passion for people and the customer is relentless.