Futureheads Five Stories: Matt Pilgrim

Matt Pilgrim is an experienced channel and alliances director and is Partner Development Director for the UK business of global digital experience platform provider Episerver. Matt took five minutes to share his thoughts about the impact of Covid-19 to Episerver and the changes they are making as a result.

Matt has perviously held leadership positions at companies including Microsoft, Sitecore, Tealium and now Episerver, and has experience of designing, implementing and managing channel and alliances businesses globally. Episerver are a global software company providing a customer centric digital experience platform. They provide content driven commerce with personalisation and analytics built in, all delivered in a cloud environment.

Matt spoke to Futureheads as part of our FFS series, a regular interview series where business and industry leaders share their insights and personal experience. Other articles in the series can be found here.

1. Tell us about the impact that Covid-19 and the lockdown measures have had on your business.

I think we have a similar story to tell as many businesses at this time. We are a partner-driven business meaning we rely on a network of agencies and system integrators to help us position, sell and implement our solution. Covid-19 has seen a lot of digital projects we were working on being be put on hold while they work through the next few months.

From an operational standpoint, it has been a relatively smooth transition to lockdown working. Episerver has a strong framework in place to support employees and we are a distributed business so remote working was already a key element of our business.

2. How have you adapted your operational and hiring practices?

There have been a number of changes operationally, mostly centering around morale and employee welfare. The business has gone to great lengths to ensure there are lots of virtual touchpoints for employees. We have creatively moved almost our entire social calendar for employees to online events and introduced specific content to help with working at home such as cookery classes, skills talks, home schooling advice most of which have been supported by the business but run voluntarily by staff. We even ran a red carpet event where people dressed in tuxedo and cocktail dresses, nominating their favourite lockdown movie. We have also increased the frequency of regional and company all hands meetings, this has helped with a feeling of inclusivity around key decisions the business is making.

3. Has this crisis made you look at your business differently or consider changes moving forwards?

We are definitely taking a different view on how we operate and there will be long-standing changes. We have tried to improve our communications both internally and externally to clients and partners. We are trying to be more considerate than ever of the challenges facing our partners – trying to notice the pressures that they face that we may not necessarily be exposed to, and I think we are a better business for it.

Episerver has demonstrated this ability to listen by releasing a number of initiatives designed to help our Partners and customers during this time, all under the Covid-19 ‘come back stronger’ response. We have made all our online training courses for developers and business users of the Episerver platform free until the end of June, we have a content diagnostics tool as part of the platform that we have made available for free to equip resource-stretched content teams with fast, actionable and real-time intelligence on how well content is meeting the needs of visitors. Plus, we have also developed a version of our digital experience platform designed for frontline industries. It’s a way for us to work with our partners to provide a website for the companies that need it most right now with really attractive commercial terms but more importantly a quick time to market. We have customers that have built a full website or commerce experience in under two weeks! Full details of our come back stronger response can be found at: https://www.episerver.com/trust-center/covid-19-come-back-stronger/

Be Kaler Pilgrim

• be@wearefutureheads.co.uk