Viya CEO Denies Business Closure, Outlines Restructuring Efforts and Service Improvements

Is VIYA going out of business? “Absolutely not,” said CEO Geraldine Pitt, when she appeared before members of the Public Services Commission on Tuesday.

However, according to Ms. Pitt, “we have had to restructure to remain relevant…to grow the business in the future, to catch up with technology.”

“We are really behind the 8-ball as a business,” Viya's CEO told commissioners, explaining some of the major changes the company has gone through recently as part of a restructuring and reorganization plan.

One of those changes has been the establishment of a customer service call center in Guyana. “The decision to do that was really based on how do we leverage technology…as a wider regional team, to be able to invest in technology needs, be able to get customers’ issues resolved quickly,” Ms. Pitt noted, acknowledging that the new call center agents would need time to get up to speed. “There's always going to be a learning curve,” she noted.

However, things are improving. Customer satisfaction with the new representatives has moved from 73% in October to 84% currently. The abandonment rate for customer service calls has fallen from 8, 9, and 10 percent in November, October and December respectively to 1 percent in January and February, Ms. Pitts said. While service levels were admittedly below PSC standards in the last quarter of 2024, the outgoing Viya CEO said that performance in the new year has been “way above the expectations.”