Today’s interview is with Jim Dicso, President and Chief Revenue Officer of SundaySky, which has pioneered technology that allows firms to deliver personalised videos to their customers in real-time. This allows firms to lower costs, increase engagement and grow revenues. Jim agreed to talk to me about the cool things that SundaySky are doing with SmartVideo, particularly in the area of proactive customer service.

This interview follows on from my recent interview: Doing Well, Doing Good And Learning The Lesson Of The Orangutan – Interview with Ken Olisa of Restoration Partners – and is number eighty one in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things and helping businesses innovate, become more social and deliver better service.

Here are the highlights of the interview with Jim:

• SundaySky has pioneered technology that allows firms to deliver personalised videos to their customers in real-time, allowing firms to lower costs, increase engagement and grow revenues.
• SundaySky’s videos are having particular success in delivering proactive customer service solutions.
• They are using them in areas like driving actions (e.g. signing up for paperless billing or for a self-service portal) or to avoid an action (e.g. an inbound phone call or cancelling a service).
• As an example of how that is working in practice, Jim told the story of AT&T who have used SundaySky’s SmartVideo solution to avoid ‘bill shock’, which generally results in frustration and an inbound phone call as the customer is shocked when they receive their first bill and does not understand all the different elements of the bill. As each customer receives their bill, they also receive a link to a personalised video that uses their bill and their data and explains all of the different elements of the bill. Te delivery of the video also allows them to promote other value add services.
• This has allowed AT&T to realise a material reduction in inbound calls, a significant increase in the uptake of value added service, like paperless statements, and an increase in it’s NPS scores.
• You can check out a video showing a SundaySky video for AT&T in action here.
• Other applications include customer on boarding, smart advertising, as well as helping reducing customer churn.
• In addition, using a customer’s data and agent logs, call centre agents are also able to send a follow up video following a customer service call to recap what was talked about and provide additional tips on how to self-serve and other recommended and relevant products and/or services.
• They use data analytics to help identify what questions are most commonly asked. Then, their SmartVideo technology adds the most relevant ‘scenes’ and answers to personalise the video to each individual customer, thus ensuring everyone gets a personalised and unique customer experience.
• Having just raised $20 million in a Series C investment round led by Comcast Ventures (Liberty Global Ventures, Vintage Investment Partners , and existing investors, Carmel Ventures, Globespan Capital Partners and Norwest Venture Partners (NVP), also participated in the round, SundaySky is set for a period of fast growth and are always looking for new opportunities and people to help them grow and fulfil their potential.

About Jim (taken from his SundaySky bio)

Jim Dicso is President and Chief Revenue Officer of SundaySky. Prior to joining SundaySky, Jim was executive vice president of sales and services at LivePerson, a SaaS-based provider of real-time online customer engagement solutions. During his tenure, LivePerson business solutions revenue grew from $17M to $96M and operating earnings grew from $2M to $30M. While at LivePerson, he built the enterprise sales organization from scratch and led the extended sales and service organization in developing and executing the go-to-market strategy while also leading the introduction of new business models to scale the business. Prior to LivePerson, Jim held multiple sales leadership roles in his two years at Witness Systems and eight years at Parametric Technology Corporation (PTC), including a four-year assignment in the UK and Europe. Prior to that, Jim served in a variety of sales positions over four years with Xerox Corporation.

 At SundaySky, Jim drives the go-to-market strategy, sales execution, business development and revenue growth for SundaySky to support the growing market demand for the company’s solution. Mr. Dicso received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Villanova University.

 You can find out more about SundaySky at their website (www.sundaysky.com) and do check them out on Twitter too @sundaysky.