ILC ARTICLE

Industry Leader Interview with James Doyle – Managing Director, SightCall

23rd November 2020

What are the challenges facing your business right now, and how are you working to overcome them?

It’s a challenging time for everyone at the moment. For us, we’re doing everything we can to support our customers and employees. This year we have really seen the power of remote visual support to not only ensure business continuity, but also to protect the health and safety of our customers and their workers around the world. Finding a balance for our employees, keeping up morale and taking the time to check if people are doing ok, is also a top priority for us. We’re a growing company and we want to continue to innovate and help our customers drive change within their organisations, so ensuring we have a supported workforce is critical.

What has been your biggest business learning from the coronavirus pandemic?

At SightCall we’re working with organisations from a number of different industries including Insurance, Manufacturing, Telecoms, Utilities, Automotive and Healthcare. Seeing how these businesses from varying markets have adapted to the COVID-19 pandemic has been really insightful for us as a business. We’ve been able to leverage some of the experiences we’ve seen in customer support and field service organisations and transfer that across into our insurance capabilities, where a self-serve model is proving quicker, less resource intensive and provides a more superior customer experience.

COVID-19 has forced a lot of businesses to change quickly. Those organisations who were already offering remote support as a service and had that capability integrated into their business processes, are the ones who have been able to adapt, maintain and improve service levels throughout the ongoing pandemic.

3. As we go to a “new normal” what are you looking forward to returning to and practices will you keep?

I’m really looking forward to interacting with people face to face again- customer meetings, workshops, events and conferences, brainstorming with colleagues in the office. Face to face communication helps to build a collaborative environment where you can energise and inspire people as well as drive ideas and innovation- nothing beats that in person interaction. Getting social events back on the calendar with the team is another thing I’m looking forward to.

One of the practices we’ll look to keep is encouraging employees to block time in their calendar where they can invest in themselves and their own wellbeing. Whether that’s going for a walk or jog, reading a book or just having an hour away from your desk during the day. This is so important for both your mental health and your productivity at work.

If you could go back to the beginning of 2020, what piece of advice would you give to yourself?

Apart from buying Pfizer stock in April and starting a PPE company, I think one of the most important pieces of advice I’d give myself is to stay calm, align with your purpose and be clear in your communication with others. No-one had a rock-solid plan for 2020, so not having a plan shouldn’t be something you worry about too much. It’s important to be able to adapt and be flexible as 2020 has proved, we never know exactly what’s around the corner.

What would be your prediction for the industry in 2021?

COVID-19 isn’t going away any time soon and the insurance sector, as well as many other sectors, needs to digitally transform so that they can take an evolutionary step forward in how to engage with their customers. We’ve seen an 80% increase in the number of remote support calls being started by our customers and this number is only going to continue to rise as businesses look to keep employees and customers safe whist ensuring business continuity. Moving forward, it will be impossible for the majority of organisations to return to their old ways of doing business. The “new normal” requires digital transformation and the adoption of remote work to ensure business survival.