NRG People Power: Customer Experience Spotlight With Olga Wiggins and Guillermo Pereira Marquez

Welcome back to People Power, where we shine a light on the NRG team members working hard to deliver world-class customer service, innovative energy solutions, and meaningful connections.

In honor of Customer Experience (CX) week, we’re featuring two colleagues whose work embodies what CX is all about — Guillermo Pereira Marquez, Marketing Analyst, Products & Propositions, and Olga Wiggins, Customer Insights & Strategy Manager.

For both Guillermo (who is known by his teammates as GMo) and Olga, the journey to their current roles at NRG began far from its Houston headquarters. Yet their stories share a common thread: bold moves, fresh perspectives, and the drive to make an impact.

GMo was born in El Salvador and moved to Houston at age 13. Navigating a new country and language shaped his determination to adapt, a skill that continues to serve him in today’s evolving energy industry. He studied Management Information Systems at the University of Houston, where an internship with an energy company first sparked his interest in the sector. After graduating, he joined a local energy provider as a data analyst, spending six years deep in the world of pricing and market operations before deciding he wanted to expand into marketing. When a recruiter from NRG reached out with just such a role, he jumped at the opportunity to grow his skill set and hasn’t looked back.

Far from GMo’s tropical birthplace, Olga’s story starts in Siberia near Lake Baikal, the world’s deepest lake and one of its coldest regions. She came to the U.S. at 22 to work as an interpreter, but her career took a new direction when she started working as a patient data analyst in the healthcare sector. While there, a friend referred her to Direct Energy for an operations remittance analyst position, which led her into the energy industry. Her experience in those roles — including digging into billing, payments, enrollments, and data usage — provided her with detailed insight into how back-office processes can impact the customer experience.

Though their professional and geographical journeys are different, together GMo and Olga underscore how diverse backgrounds create richer perspectives, reflecting the equally diverse experiences and needs of NRG’s customers.

In their day-to-day work, both GMo and Olga are focused on making customer interactions simpler, smoother, and more meaningful.

GMo manages the customer portals for NRG Business: MyAccount and Online Account Management (OAM). With more than 68,000 users, these platforms are critical tools for business customers, brokers, and internal teams alike. Because users rely on the portals to access detailed account information and complete a variety of account management activities quickly and accurately — including making payments — it’s crucial that the platforms are designed for ease of use and reliability.

From drafting business requirements to testing releases and monitoring the customer impact of enhancements after launch, GMo enjoys the challenge of seeing projects through from start to finish for such a complex infrastructure. His focus is on ensuring NRG’s digital customer tools are intuitive, reliable, and empowering. “I want people to know they have everything they need right at their fingertips,” he explains. Whether that’s by reducing the need to call the care team for assistance, updating data in real time, or rolling out enhancements like the recent addition of WalkMe, a how-to guide for the portal, GMo thrives on making sure the customer’s digital journey feels supported at every step.

Olga’s role is about making sure the customer’s voice isn’t just heard, but acted upon. “I think customers can feel overwhelmed with surveys from companies sometimes,” she says. “But it’s important for them to know we actually read all of their responses and use that information.” She analyzes surveys and feedback — from emails to voicemails to video — to identify patterns and ensure that feedback reaches the teams who can act on it.

What she loves most are the unexpected details that surface: small comments that reveal big opportunities. Her background in teaching English as a second language (ESL), data analysis, and back-office operations gives her a unique lens for interpreting customer input. It allows her to extrapolate a story from the data, distilling the customer’s voice in a way that provides a tailored road map for NRG to move forward.

Both Olga and GMo’s work reflects NRG’s core values of collaboration, creativity, and customer focus — qualities that earned them each a 2025 NRG President’s Club Award for Marketing Excellence.

At the ceremony, Shanique Farquharson, Director, Products & Propositions, recognized GMo for his ability to be a customer advocate, utilizing and upgrading tools to empower customers with broader self-service support. Additionally, “His training calls have been instrumental in educating our internal teams on the portals, and his collaborative demeanor has earned him widespread trust and praise,” Shanique summed up at the awards ceremony.

Director of Customer Insights & Business Solutions, Charlene Blandon, praised Olga during the award presentation, saying, “She’s a collaborative powerhouse, working cross-functionally to make sure the insights we gain from customer feedback are actionable and impactful.” Stakeholders rely on her quarterly and year-in-review metrics presentations to make strategy decisions and keep teams across the organization on target with business goals.

GMo and Olga were also instrumental in presenting award submissions in the categories of “Best Use of Customer Feedback” and “Customer-Centric Culture” at the prestigious 2025 U.S. Customer Experience Awards (US CXA), a subsidiary of Awards International. Their comprehensive briefs resulted in NRG Business taking home the Silver Award for “Customer-Centric Culture,” where the team was recognized for their innovative, holistic approach to customer-first values.

For both Olga and GMo, recognition of their work is especially meaningful given their unconventional paths. Neither has a traditional marketing education, but they have built their expertise by leaning into their strengths — connecting with people, collaborating, staying curious, and putting customers first every time.

While their professional lives revolve around data and technology, both GMo and Olga value unplugging for relaxation.

For Gmo, that means cycling and traveling. He finds peace in national parks like the Grand Canyon and Yosemite. “My happy place is being out in nature — it’s meditative,” he says. He also likes to connect with other young professionals through NRG’s resource groups, including ¡Hola!, a celebration of Hispanic and Latino cultures. On weekends, you can find Gmo enjoying a good Hawaiian pizza, an iced caramel macchiato with espresso (something has to power his long bike rides!), and laughing with friends.

Olga’s world is anchored by her family — her four children (her biggest inspiration), her husband, and their two dogs. She spends most of her time away from work at volleyball and cheer events or whipping up her famous lemon bread. In rare quiet moments, she enjoys reading John Grisham novels — which she introduced to her brother back in Russia and now claims credit for his becoming an attorney — and watching Houston Texans games with her husband, who taught her to appreciate American football.

The stories of Olga and GMo remind us that a great customer experience isn’t just a process — it’s a deliberate daily habit, a mindset to be cultivated. GMo’s been studying habit-building recently to build strong personal routines and has found the principle applies at work as well. “Even a 1% change in how you approach something can improve it so much,” he says. Focusing on what customers need takes practice and discernment. By bringing their unique life experiences to their roles, GMo and Olga help NRG stay connected to the broad range of perspectives and needs of customers.

As NRG celebrates CX Week, we thank Olga, Guillermo, and every NRG employee who puts our customers at the heart of what we do each day. When we listen, learn, and act with care, we don’t just deliver energy — we deliver confidence, connection, and complete satisfaction.