Jim Dicso, President & Chief Revenue Officer at SundaySky, will be a featured speaker at the Engagement & Experience Expo, which will be held Nov. 5-7, 2013 at the Westin Galleria in Dallas, Texas. Dicso participated in a Q&A with Loyalty 360 and offered insights connected to his featured session titled, “How to Use Smarter Video to Deliver a Differentiated Welcome Experience.”
Engagement & Experience Expo is a forum to openly discuss customer, brand and channel challenges and solutions. Through a robust slate of best-in-class speakers and interactive discussions, attendees will learn about the latest theories, best practices, relevant case studies, emerging trends and strategies that drive measurable behavioral change and quantifiable results.
Q: Can you define smarter video and explain why it’s important in engaging customers today?
More than ever, brands today need differentiated strategies to compete in challenging markets, and personalized customer experiences are becoming a key driver for such strategies. Companies are leveraging customers’ data to support such personalization strategies, and smart video sits right at this intersection – leveraging big data to generate a video that is personalized and contextually relevant to the customer at the moment he is viewing the video.
Q: How widespread are personalized videos from companies to customers, and how have they impacted customer engagement?
Telecommunications providers and online retailers worldwide have delivered personalized videos to their customers over the last few years. SundaySky has been the market leader with more than 125 million SmartVideo views, and we continue to see more and more companies evaluate the personalized video space. Many of the top Internet Retailers, the leading five cable providers and four of the top six wireless providers in the U.S., as well as several of the largest telcos in Europe, all deliver SundaySky SmartVideos as part of a core strategy for acquiring new and engaging existing customers. Most recently, we have seen the emergence of healthcare and insurance providers, such as Liberty Mutual, as well as travel and hospitality brands, take interest with SmartVideo, too.
On average, 84% of customers who view personalized videos find them helpful, 60% of customers watch them to completion, up to 24% click-through in-video calls to action.
Q: Why should companies consider using personalized video to increase customer engagement?
Marketing executives and CMOs in different industries across the Fortune 500 have strategies in place in which they engage customers at different stages of the customer lifecycle. A company’s actions from the moment of acquiring a new customer have a direct material effect on the length and value of the relationship you will have with the customer. Any individual action or communication can increase customer engagement, but layering multiple together across a consistent lifecycle strategy increases engagement tremendously.
Our customers leverage smart, personalized video at key engagement points through the lifecycle, from the first communication after purchase, through traditional places of friction or where potential customer churn may occur, and at different touch points of developing and cultivating customer loyalty. SmartVideo strategies deliver personalized communication at each customer lifecycle stage via a deeper, more compelling and engaging experience, over static mediums such as email or snail mail.
Q: With the advent of social, mobile and other emerging technologies, how do brands effectively improve the customer experience and engage their audience in this challenging and very dynamic marketing environment?
If brands treat each channel uniquely then the result is disparate messages to the customer, which is challenging for a consistent customer experience. Understanding the experience a customer had in the last engagement point, and leveraging that experience as part of an ongoing conversation with the customer is key for addressing such challenges. Smarter applications of video support these efforts with a customer experience created in real time, so it is always relevant and reflective of the most recent information about the customer’s experience.
Q: What are the challenges you see with multichannel communication for today’s marketers and how do we best address this opportunity for increased engagement?
Marketers forget that an individual customer is the same person no matter which channel he or she is engaging with. By understanding that a consumer is the same person across multiple channels lies opportunity for brands to better engage with that customer, by leveraging data. This is why we see the emergence of more loyalty and rewards programs that ask customers to opt-in information about themselves, to allow for that continued dialogue with a brand over time.
Q: What new/trending technology do you believe has the best ability to evoke the senses to shape and steer meaningful and desired experiences for products and brands?
Of course I believe SmartVideo to be one, simply because by definition video is the most engaging medium available to tell a story and message, yet is also uniquely personalized for deeper engagement. I also anticipate mobile applications have the ability to deliver experiences in context to the consumer’s location and/or actions, as well as behaviors across multiple devices and mediums via a logged in experience. These technologies provide a vision for what’s possible in the future.
Q: Loyalty 360 believes that loyalty is the most important facet to consider in any marketing strategy. How can one create loyalty when so many technologies are focused on mass acquisition of customers, which may or not be aligned effectively with the product offering?
The outcome of new customer acquisition should set a solid expectation and value proposition to the customer, yet many times there is a gap between the purchase decision and the delivery and/or use of the service or product, and the customer’s expectations may not be met. A welcome and onboarding experience re-affirms the customer’s decision, explains specifics of the product or service, and highlights value-added opportunities the customer may not be aware of. Engaging customers post-purchase in this way from day one – and through the first 90 days of the customer lifecycle – is where opportunity lies for strengthening and lengthening a customer relationship for long-term loyalty.
Q: What will be the biggest opportunity for marketers in the next 3-5 years?
With the advent of big data, I believe opportunity lies in the unprecedented ability for marketers to understand an individual’s want and needs on a one-to-one basis. This will allow for highly customized, personalized, and contextually relevant messages delivered at appropriate engagement points in time. Segment marketing is no longer enough. We are approaching the age of one-to-one marketing, and when intersected with contextual relevance, marketers will be delivering extremely tailored messages at mass scale that get to the heart of a customer’s buying criteria.
Q: Six qualities define engagement – value, efficiency, trust, consistency, relevance and control. Which term do you think the market finds the easiest to implement and what term does it find the most difficult?
I believe efficiency is the easiest quality to implement because it is measured by speed – how long something takes, various milestones and an endpoint. Value is the most difficult because it is a reflection on effectiveness rather than efficiency, and everyone values engagement differently.
Q: What will be the biggest challenge for marketing in the next 3-5 years?
The rights to a customer’s personal data is the biggest challenge I foresee. Collecting personal data is becoming ever more a concern for consumers, so companies need to provide a value proposition for customers to willingly opt-in personal data for such engagement strategies