Through­out the pan­dem­ic, Dig­i­cel em­ploy­ees stayed mo­ti­vat­ed by main­tain­ing fo­cus on their pur­pose and mis­sion to keep cus­tomers con­nect­ed to the peo­ple and ex­pe­ri­ences they need­ed.

This was re­vealed by Dig­i­cel CEO, Abra­ham Smith, who was speak­ing as a pan­el­list at a re­cent vir­tu­al break­fast meet­ing host­ed by UWI’s Busi­ness De­vel­op­ment Unit of the Fac­ul­ty of So­cial Sci­ences.

At the event ti­tled– The Path to Evo­lu­tion­ary Lead­er­ship–” Smith al­so ex­plained the fast-tracked ap­proach to lead­er­ship at Dig­i­cel by de­scrib­ing a pi­lot pro­gramme the com­pa­ny want­ed to launch one week be­fore the pan­dem­ic hit T&T.

“Be­fore all the lock­downs be­gan, we were in a man­age­ment meet­ing dis­cussing how we were go­ing to run a six-month pi­lot project to test our cus­tomer care folks work­ing from home,” Smith said.

How­ev­er, he added, this ini­tial plan on­ly in­clud­ed a hand­ful of cus­tomer care em­ploy­ees.

“One week lat­er, on like a Thurs­day or so, it be­came clear. If we can’t come in­to the of­fice, what are we go­ing to do? For­tu­nate­ly, we didn’t stick to the orig­i­nal pi­lot plan.

“We got folks from all through the or­gan­i­sa­tion to say, ‘How can we make this hap­pen by Mon­day? and by the next Tues­day we had over 300 cus­tomer care staff in­stalled with the right in­ter­net, com­put­ers de­liv­ered to their homes, and tak­ing calls from their homes,” Smith ex­plained.

Ac­cord­ing to Smith, lis­ten­ing to the col­lec­tive in­tel­li­gence of every­one in the or­gan­i­sa­tion was one of the keys to ac­cel­er­at­ing the dig­i­tal op­er­a­tor’s abil­i­ty to im­ple­ment new plans quick­ly and suc­cess­ful­ly with­out in­ter­rupt­ing ser­vice to cus­tomers.

Ad­di­tion­al­ly, he high­light­ed that there was an ur­gent need for the or­gan­i­sa­tion to trans­form dur­ing that time and get­ting every­one on board was key to its suc­cess.

Smith added that or­gan­i­sa­tion­al lead­er­ship and a fo­cus on cre­at­ing so­lu­tions were il­lus­trat­ed at Dig­i­cel, as the com­pa­ny made in­ter­nal sac­ri­fices while si­mul­ta­ne­ous­ly en­sured that present and fu­ture sus­tain­abil­i­ty were a prime fo­cal point.

He not­ed that this was the rea­son Dig­i­cel im­ple­ment­ed a clear digi­ti­sa­tion pro­gramme, which al­so in­volved hir­ing new peo­ple in soft­ware, da­ta and dig­i­tal prod­ucts man­age­ment.

More­over, as it per­tains to growth Smith said, “We al­so had to fo­cus on how are we go­ing to con­tin­ue to grow. ‘What new op­por­tu­ni­ties have opened up?’,‘What new needs are there for our cus­tomers? and I think that was the im­por­tant thing.”

As a re­sult, Dig­i­cel suc­cess­ful­ly re-en­gi­neered its pop­u­lar con­sumer prod­ucts, in­tro­duc­ing new prime bun­dles, to give cus­tomers more da­ta and ac­cess to a suite of 8 spe­cial­i­ty apps de­signed to com­ple­ment their new dig­i­tal lifestyles.

Dig­i­cel al­so pledged spon­sor­ship of a schol­ar­ship for a stu­dent to at­tend the next train­ing sem­i­nar host­ed by the Busi­ness De­vel­op­ment Unit.