In Conversation with Adam Taylor, VeriCall CEO: ‘We Work in Partnership with Our Clients to Fully Integrate into their Organisation and Ensure that Customers are the Focal Point of Our Decision-Making Processes’

VeriCall delivers high-quality customer service solutions over all communication platforms. It enables businesses to put together the customer service solution to support their customers in real-time across their channel of choice, with a bespoke service delivery model designed in partnership to support their customers to maximize their value out of a solution.

The company was established in 2017 and is based in Fife, Scotland.

Adam Taylor, VeriCall CEO, spoke exclusively to The Silicon Review. Below is an excerpt.

Q. What are the critical issues addressed by your solutions?

VeriCall offers a comprehensive range of solutions from fully PCI DSS compliant payments to AI solutions and omnichannel products too. In addition, we have a range of services for SME’s and even micro-businesses and while we operate at the cutting edge of technology and, indeed, make sure we stay there—this isn’t the end of the story.

I believe that customer service is the critical differentiating factor between businesses enabling to gain and retain customers. Over the last decade, there has been an explosion of choice as businesses have learned how to exploit the opportunities presented by direct online retail and service provision.

Thanks to this increase in choice, consumers are now more empowered than ever to move and choose suppliers who meet their needs and expectations.

Q. Reshaping customer expectations and increasing business competition has made it harder for call centres to meet customer expectations. How do you manage to align your services with ever-evolving customer expectations?

The first issue here is businesses still thinking of themselves as call centres. At VeriCall, we refer to ourselves as an ‘Engagement Hub’. In modern customer service delivery, organisations must provide a centralized hub to enable their customers to engage as they see fit. This starts with a holistic approach to identify the customer requirements to develop the appropriate model for a particular organization. This, in turn, creates the right ‘feedback loop’ to deliver insight back to the contracting organisation to further develop their business. This links to the ‘Engagement Hub’ approach.

By fully engaging with consumers, we can capture intelligence to feedback into organisations enabling them to constantly refine processes and identify pinch points and opportunities to continually develop their proposition. We work in partnership with our clients to fully integrate into their organisation and ensure that customers are the focal point of both of our decision-making processes.

Q. With thousands of customer service solutions providers in the market, business owners have a lot of options to choose the best. What makes you the best customer services partner?

VeriCall is in the fortunate position of being recent to the market. This means we are not encumbered by legacy infrastructure and processes enabling us to be more agile and responsive than our peers. Having personally come from the client-side of the outsourced relationship we have a unique perspective from the top of the organisation as to the challenges and obstacles of an outsourced relationship, enabling us to place ourselves in the mind of the client to develop our processes to work for our clients and their customers.

I also believe that any company must lead from the top down and this is the philosophy that I have tried to imbue throughout VeriCall. My leadership style is fully inclusive and this is an approach I have encouraged my managers to adopt as well.

Q. You need extremely dedicated and talented individuals in-house to provide flawless customer service solutions. How did you manage to form your dream team?

In the early days of VeriCall, I was able to identify those who I had worked with earlier in my career who shared the same vision and ethics I wished to instil in the organisation and invite them to form part of our journey. Thankfully most of them agreed with me and joined! Following this, we have, for example, been working with local education authority partners to create psychometric testing to identify personality traits which will be suited to our aims. We focus less on skills as we can train these but look for personalities that are focused on giving to and supporting others, are self-motivated, and have a drive for growth to form our teams.

Then, and even more so now, we use Social Media extensively as a recruitment channel linked to a specific section of our website. We have grown and continue to grow so fast that we must use everything at our disposal and LinkedIn and Facebook postings on our company profile—along with targeted postings on job groups within SM focused on our geographical area in Scotland have paid dividends for us already.

Q. How do you keep your team motivated despite conflicts and obstacles?

I believe motivation comes from being invested in the project. Maintaining clear and open communication lines to ensure that all team members are aware of and share the vision for a better way of delivering customer services. This means we are all aligned in our goals and motivated to achieve the aim of delivering modern customer services that work for customers, clients, and VeriCall.

We also have a number of incentive schemes that recognize and reward people right across the company to make sure they know they are appreciated and that–literally–VeriCall could not achieve what it does without them!

Q. If you had one piece of advice to someone just starting as an entrepreneur, what would it be?

Never give up, as anyone embarks on an entrepreneurial journey, we all face days where it feels like the roof is caving in and we may have failed. Remember this is a fleeting moment and it will happen! The main difference between those who succeed and those who do not is the ability to pick yourself up, dust off, and keep moving forward towards the original goal, albeit sometimes by plotting a new route.

Once you know something is not working, don’t repeat the same thing over and over. Think laterally and try something new. The only way to move forward is to be adaptable and take what works onwards and try new things when other solutions don’t.

Q. What do you think is the most memorable moment in your career?

The first time a former team member contacted me to thank us for helping them to develop and achieve a job offer in their dream career. Whilst it was sad to see them leave us if we can help people to develop and reach their goals, whether with us or in another field, then we have achieved our mission to provide people with a platform to create a path that will carry them forward in their future career.

Q. What does the future hold for VeriCall and its customers? Are exciting things on the way?

After achieving 800 percent growth in 2020, VeriCall has started 2021 continuing to onboard new clients and developing business in the most difficult of circumstances during the pandemic. With further projects close to signing, we anticipate that 2021 will achieve similar levels of growth to 2020 as we aim to become the market leader in the UK and beyond.

We have several new services, both as enhancements of existing ones and completely new ones—that will be introduced over the coming months too. One of the other things about being and staying successful is to never stand still and be complacent about what you have achieved. There is always more to be done and new, exciting goals to be set and exceeded.

“With further projects close to signing, we anticipate that 2021 will achieve similar levels of growth to 2020 as we aim to become the market leader in the UK and beyond.”

For more information visit:

www.vericallsolutions.com

www.pippathepa.com