In a service driven economy, the difference between a brand that survives and a brand that earns long term trust is often found in one place: how it treats people when they need help. The Dratech Customer Relationship Excellence Award was created to recognise professionals who turn that simple truth into structured, repeatable practice, backed by data, discipline, and clear results.
The 2022 award cycle has just concluded, and from a pool of ten carefully shortlisted nominees, three outstanding professionals emerged as recognised winners. Among them, Ms Erica Afrihyia stands out as a leader who has translated customer empathy into operational strength and strategic influence. She met every judging criterion for the 2022 cycle, not only in terms of outcomes achieved, but in the clarity of her methods and the consistency of her approach across different roles in the financial and insurance sectors.
Her recognition under the Dratech Customer Relationship Excellence Award is not a ceremonial gesture. It is a response to a clear pattern in her work: shorter waiting times, stronger service quality, improved retention, better designed workflows, and a visible shift toward systems that treat customers as people, not case numbers.
This editorial takes a closer look at why Erica’s work matters, how it aligns with the spirit of the award, and what it signals for the future of customer experience and service innovation across Africa.
The judging standards for the Dratech Customer Relationship Excellence Award are built on evidence, not slogans. Nominees are assessed on measurable improvements in customer outcomes, leadership in building service frameworks, intelligent use of data and feedback, and wider sector influence. Erica’s record fits that profile with precision.
First, she led tangible improvements in customer service operations. At Enterprise Life Insurance in Sunyani, she managed customer service with a focus on the full experience, from the moment a client walked in to the moment a claim, refund, or policy request was resolved. Waiting times were cut by more than half, not through guesswork, but through redesign of workflows, smarter queuing processes, and closer coordination with other departments. Retention improved because service became predictable, responsive, and less frustrating for customers who depended on timely decisions.
Second, she worked across teams, not in isolation. Erica built bridges between customer service, claims, underwriting, and sales. Instead of allowing each unit to operate in silos, she made sure customer issues moved through the system with fewer bottlenecks and less duplication. That kind of cross functional coordination is one of the quiet markers of leadership in real service environments. It does not always attract headlines, but it is exactly what changes outcomes on the ground.
Third, she transformed data, feedback, and frontline insight into better service delivery. Her approach did not treat customer complaints as noise. Each interaction was a source of information. Patterns in questions, delays, and repeat visits were used to adjust processes. That habit of listening to the frontline, then translating what she learned into process changes, aligns directly with Dratech’s focus on innovation that improves how people interact with essential services.
Finally, the award reflects both her operational achievements and her broader impact across the financial and insurance sectors. From retail banking to life insurance, Erica has worked in environments where trust, clarity, and responsiveness are non negotiable. Her work shows that strong customer relationships are not separate from performance; they are a core part of it.
Professional Profile of Erica Afrihyia
To understand why this recognition matters, it helps to look at how Erica’s profile has evolved. She is a public health minded strategist whose foundation in Business Administration and Accounting gives her a rare combination of numerical discipline and human centered thinking. Her academic training in accounting taught her how to follow the numbers.
Her early career took shape within Ghana’s financial services sector. At Consolidated Bank Ghana in Sunyani, she worked as a Customer Relations Officer. In this role, she built long term client relationships through personalised service, advisory support, and practical help with everyday banking procedures. She handled complaints directly, explained products clearly, and acted as a connector between customers and internal teams such as credit, loans, and operations. Those early years sharpened her understanding of what customers actually face when they try to navigate financial systems.
Her move to Enterprise Life Insurance marked a turning point. As Customer Service Manager, Erica was no longer only responding to issues; she was shaping the system that produced those issues. She took charge of customer service operations, supervised front desk and back office processes, and managed the resolution of escalated complaints. The reduction in waiting times by over fifty percent was not a cosmetic improvement. It represented careful observation, redesign of steps, and a willingness to change entrenched routines.
She also coordinated closely with claims, underwriting, and sales teams, making sure that customers did not get bounced around without answers. By aligning these units, she helped the organisation deliver service that felt joined up instead of fragmented. At the same time, she maintained oversight of benefits processing, from claims settlements to refunds, and monitored service performance metrics to keep standards high.
By the time of the 2022 Dratech award cycle, Erica had evolved into an emerging voice in health driven innovation. What set her apart was not only her knowledge of financial products or healthcare concepts, but her commitment to systems that treat people with dignity. In every context, she focused on evidence, fairness, and clear communication. Customers were not reduced to statistics, yet data was never ignored. That balance lies at the heart of customer relationship excellence.
How Her Track Record Fits the Customer Relationship Excellence Award
The Dratech Customer Relationship Excellence Award is not a generic customer service prize. It recognises professionals who can translate customer experience into measurable operational strength and long term organisational value. Erica’s work fits that benchmark in several interconnected ways.
- Transforming customer experience into operational strength: At Enterprise Life Insurance, reduced waiting times were the visible symptom of a deeper operational shift. By redesigning workflows, Erica made processes leaner and removed unnecessary steps. Faster service was not achieved by cutting corners, but by dealing directly with bottlenecks. Shorter queues translated into more satisfied customers, fewer escalations, and better use of staff time. Service excellence here meant operational clarity.
- Using data and insight to guide improvement: Across her roles, Erica has shown a consistent habit of reading what the numbers say about customer experience. Patterns in complaints, lag times, repeat visits, and policy adjustments were not treated as random noise. They were signals that guided decisions on where to intervene. Her later work, highlighted in media features on data driven planning, reinforces this pattern. She views data as a tool for making services more humane, not as an abstract exercise.
- Demonstrating leadership in customer centered frameworks: Leadership in customer relationship work shows up in how systems are designed and how people are aligned. Erica has demonstrated the ability to bring frontline staff, administrative teams, and technical units together around a clear goal: make the service easier to navigate and more responsive to real needs. Her cross departmental coordination between claims, underwriting, and sales is one example. Her ability to push for service standards while supporting her teams is another.
- Strengthening organisational trust and quality of interactions: Customer relationship excellence is ultimately about trust. In both banking and insurance, customers entrust their money, their policies, and often their long term security to institutions. Each interaction either strengthens or weakens that trust. Erica’s track record of personalised advisory support, clear communication, and reliable follow through has helped build that trust in very practical ways. Clients know that their concerns will be heard and that the system behind the counter is designed to respond, not deflect.
Taken together, these elements show why the Dratech panel found her work closely aligned with the award’s intent. She has not only improved metrics; she has helped build frameworks where respect, clarity, and data informed decision making reinforce one another.
Broader Significance for Customer Experience and Service Innovation
Erica’s recognition carries meaning beyond her individual career. It speaks to the evolving expectations of customers across Africa and the kind of leadership that will define the next phase of service delivery, both in the private sector and in public systems.
In financial and insurance services, customers are demanding more than polite conversation. They expect transparency, shorter delays, and processes that do not punish them for seeking help. By cutting waiting times, improving retention, and creating smoother coordination between departments, Erica has shown that these expectations can be met in real institutions, not only in strategy documents.
Her interest in predictive analytics and health data, as highlighted by media coverage of her work, positions her at the intersection of two critical trends: the rise of data driven decision making and the need for humane, equitable service delivery. In this space, innovation is not only about new tools, but about asking the right questions. Which customers are consistently left behind. Which complaints keep recurring. Which process failures cause the most harm. Leaders who can connect these dots will define the future of customer experience across the continent.
Erica’s story also reinforces a simple but powerful idea: customer relationship excellence is not limited to any one sector. Skills gained in banking can strengthen insurance operations. Lessons from life insurance can inform public health service models. Data practices tested in health projects can refine customer experience frameworks for essential services. In that sense, her work is a bridge between domains that are often treated as separate.
For young professionals watching her rise, the message is clear. Technical skills matter. So does the ability to read data. But the foundation of real excellence in customer relationships lies in seeing the person at the other end of the service and then building systems that respect that person’s time, needs, and dignity.
On behalf of the Dratech International community, this editorial extends warm and professional congratulations to Ms Erica Afrihyia on her recognition as one of the winners of the Dratech Customer Relationship Excellence Award 2022.
Her selection from ten nominees and her position among the top three recognised winners reflect a careful and rigorous review of her work. The award acknowledges a record of measurable improvements in service operations, thoughtful use of data, and persistent advocacy for customer centered systems. It also recognises her evolving role as a public health minded strategist who is prepared to apply these same principles to larger, more complex systems.
The Dratech Customer Relationship Excellence Award is intended to highlight individuals whose work signals where service innovation in Africa is heading. In Erica’s case, that future is one in which customer experience is not treated as a cosmetic layer, but as a core part of organisational design and public value. Her blend of financial services experience, insurance operations leadership, and health focused data insight offers a template for the kind of cross sector leadership that the continent increasingly needs.
As Dratech looks toward future award cycles, leaders like Erica help sharpen the standard. They remind us that excellence is not only about what is achieved in one year, but about the trajectory those achievements set in motion. The systems she has helped reshape in Ghana’s financial and insurance sectors will continue to serve customers long after the 2022 award year. Her growing influence in public health and data driven innovation suggests that her best work may still be ahead.
In celebrating Erica today, Dratech is also affirming a broader conviction. Africa’s service landscape is changing, and the people driving that change combine empathy with analytics, frontline insight with strategic thinking, and local experience with global awareness.
Erica Afrihyia stands firmly within that emerging group. Her recognition under the Dratech Customer Relationship Excellence Award 2022 is fully earned, and it points toward a future in which customer experience, public service systems, and innovation are tightly aligned.
For Dratech International, for the organisations she has served, and for the communities that benefit from better designed services, this is a development worth celebrating.
