Af­ter a dif­fi­cult pe­ri­od in the first half of the year, the new­ly ap­point­ed CEO of Dig­i­cel T&T Abra­ham Smith has re­vealed that the com­pa­ny’s cash flows have been sta­bilised.

In an in­ter­view with the Sun­day Busi­ness Guardian, Smith said: “Late March and April in­to May was def­i­nite­ly a huge hit and a lot of that took a month or two to shake out - but in terms of what I see in cus­tomers’ lives, I think it’s now kind of sta­bilised, es­pe­cial­ly since the mid­dle of Au­gust its now kind of sta­bilised quite a bit.”

Ac­cord­ing to Smith, dur­ing the ini­tial stages of the lock­down there were a lot of ‘in­tense dif­fi­cul­ties’. On it’s so­cial me­dia pages, Dig­i­cel was re­cent­ly crit­i­cized for the amount of dis­con­nec­tions that oc­curred dur­ing the dur­ing the first lock­down.

How­ev­er, the com­pa­ny not­ed that of its cus­tomer base of over 200,000 cus­tomers, less than 20,000 peo­ple were dis­con­nect­ed from ac­cess­ing their ser­vices.

Dig­i­cel al­so re­vealed then that the cus­tomers who were dis­con­nect­ed had a bad cred­it his­to­ry and were al­so 57 days late on their bill pay­ment.

Smith not­ed, nev­er­the­less that the com­pa­ny is still flex­i­ble to work with clients with their spe­cif­ic needs whether it means to down­grade or con­vert a ser­vice.

Ad­di­tion­al­ly, Dig­i­cel has not gone un­touched from the hav­oc wreaked by COVID-19 as it im­ple­ment­ed a tiered fi­nan­cial re­duc­tion plan for the en­tire fi­nan­cial year, which is set to end on March 31st, 2021.

Re­spond­ing to his fore­cast for 2020 and 2021 CEO, Smith ex­pressed: “We def­i­nite­ly, just like every house­hold in T&T, the COVID pe­ri­od has pre­sent­ed some re­al chal­lenges both fi­nan­cial chal­lenges and op­er­a­tional chal­lenges and we feel the ef­fects of that like every­one feels the ef­fects.”

Smith said his cur­rent fo­cus is on adapt­ing to the chal­lenges that are pre­sent­ed. He gave the ex­am­ple of Dig­i­cel’s call cen­tres. Smith ar­tic­u­lat­ed that he has had to adapt to the COVID in­duced chal­lenge of mov­ing 400+ peo­ple to work­ing from home as call cen­tre agents.

Smith said there has been a chance in the us­age of Dig­i­cel’s ser­vices with cus­tomers re­quir­ing less mo­bile (voice/tele­phone op­tions) to Dig­i­cel-plus (da­ta op­tions).

He added that the com­pa­ny has to con­tin­u­al­ly ask the ques­tion: “Are we ad­just­ing our re­sources and net­work band­width to make sure that gets de­liv­ered well.” Smith not­ed that it would be the com­pa­ny’s adapt­abil­i­ty and flex­i­bil­i­ty that will make it more suc­cess­ful.

He em­pha­sised: “But I think, yeah, we def­i­nite­ly suf­fered some chal­lenges dur­ing the big lock down pe­ri­ods, but we’re def­i­nite­ly com­ing out of those as the rest of the coun­try comes out. We’re fol­low­ing the same trends that we see in oth­er sec­tors.”

In spite of the chal­lenges posed by COVID-19, Smith said there are op­por­tu­ni­ties that he is ex­cit­ed about. He in­di­cat­ed that nine months ago no­body was or­der­ing food on­line, but now it has be­come com­mon­place.

“That’s ex­cit­ing and that opens up new op­por­tu­ni­ties not on­ly for small medi­um busi­ness­es, it opens up op­por­tu­ni­ties for in­fra­struc­ture providers, it opens up op­por­tu­ni­ties for gov­ern­ment and reg­u­la­to­ry bod­ies to adapt and ad­just so that we can face the new re­al­i­ty,” said Smith.

Fur­ther­more, Smith said with the re­cent up­surge in on­line or­der­ing, de­liv­ery and ride shar­ing apps, he be­lieves that coun­try is on the edge of a lot of trans­for­ma­tion.

Dig­i­cel’s CEO said this is be­cause the ca­pa­bil­i­ties of the app de­vel­op­ers is res­i­dent in the coun­try and now peo­ple are be­com­ing aware of their dig­i­tal needs. Smith added: “I think that lit­tle ker­nel is now go­ing to have some off­shoots in­to how do peo­ple get fi­nan­cial­ly in­clud­ed in­to that eco-sys­tem.”

With re­gard to the afore­men­tioned types of in­no­va­tions, Smith said he be­lieves T&T is at the fore­front of the Caribbean.

More­over, Smith said that there are al­so some big­ger things that are on the B2B (Busi­ness to Busi­ness) and B2G (Busi­ness to Gov­ern­ment) are­na on how the coun­try ad­dress­es health and ed­u­ca­tion.

He said those are two el­e­ments that have re­al­ly sprung up dur­ing the COVID-19 pe­ri­od with re­gard to the coun­try’s dig­i­tal op­ti­mi­sa­tion, Smith not­ed: “I think those are the two ar­eas where you’re go­ing to see trans­for­ma­tion and we’re ex­cit­ed to help de­liv­er.”

Re­cent­ly Dig­i­cel failed to get an in­junc­tion grant­ed against TSTT due to con­tentions around port­ing (when a cus­tomer wants to switch from one net­work to an­oth­er but re­tain their phone num­ber). The mat­ter was giv­en in­to the hands of the Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Au­thor­i­ty of T&T to me­di­ate.

Com­ment­ing on the mat­ter, Smith said: “There are still pro­ceed­ings hap­pen­ing.” He con­tin­ued to in­di­cate that if the de­ci­sion by the court is read care­ful­ly, it will high­light the re­al­i­ties of how com­pa­nies treat their cus­tomers.

Smith ar­gued: “This now goes to the big­ger piece of what we’re com­mit­ting to, which are cus­tomer promis­es and how we op­er­ate as a com­pa­ny, be­ing trans­par­ent with our cus­tomers.”

Dig­i­cel has re­cent­ly an­nounced five promis­es to its cus­tomers, one of which is to give speedy 24/7 ac­cess to cus­tomer care and do­ing its “ut­most to an­swer chat queries in 10 sec­onds and calls in 20 sec­onds.”

Smith said: “Those things are so im­por­tant to us be­cause as you can see as you read that (court) de­ci­sion, we can’t have com­pa­nies de­lib­er­ate­ly treat­ing cus­tomers in a bad way, es­pe­cial­ly when they have so much pow­er in the mar­ket.”

The new CEO of Dig­i­cel T&T said that al­though there will be “bumps in the road” the promis­es made by the com­pa­ny are not emp­ty, and it ex­pects to be called out and held ac­count­able when it don’t de­liv­er.