Festive Focus: Bdaily talks to Sky UK digital service director Adrian Hicks

Can you introduce yourself and your business to our readers?

“Hi I’m Adrian Hicks, the director of digital service at Sky, and it’s my job to make our customer service brilliant for customers online, in the My Sky App and on their Sky boxes.

“Sky prides itself on customer service as much as it does its on-screen content, and digital is far and away our customers’ preferred way to get service, so we have to be great! We are based in our Digital Centre of Excellence in Leeds Dock, but Sky as a company also has contact centres and many engineers right across Yorkshire.”

What was your company’s biggest achievement of the year?

“Being Sky there are many! I think as a company we are most excited the partnerships we’ve made that bring even more great content to our customers – Netflix and Spotify are on our Sky Q boxes, and from next year BT Sport will be available through Sky.

“Closer to home at our Digital CoE in Leeds the biggest achievement is how we now use data to improve customer experience; we’ve won awards for how we used data and insight to design our online bills to clearly answer virtually all customer questions, and we are now recognised as leaders in using optimisation and experimentation to drive digital customer experience improvements.”

How would you approach 2018 differently, given the chance?

“I don’t think there is anything I would do differently. We learn many new things every day (which is great), but that doesn’t mean we should have necessarily done them differently.

“Our big focus in digital service is making all our customer service fully integrated with seamless journeys from digital to being assisted by our contact centre advisors. This will be transformational for our customers and maybe we could have stepped into it earlier, but I see it as now just making 2019 in Leeds Dock even more exciting.”

What are your company’s plans for the new year?

“So, you might have seen that Sky has been bought by Comcast in the US. This has opened up some great opportunities to share best practice, leverage a new global presence and provide access to extra resources to go faster, therefore this will be a huge focus across the company next year.

“On top of this we are investing in more great on-screen content, especially Sky Originals, and we have some exciting product innovations that I wish I could say more about.”

What’s your favourite Christmas song?

“This is the toughest question! Christmas is taken very seriously in the Hicks household. I’ve always loved Driving Home for Christmas by Chris Rea, as for over 25 years I’ve had that moment in the car heading home where it’s come on the radio and its feels like Christmas is within touching distance.

“However, I think Merry Christmas Everyone by Slade is the all-time favourite for my wife and I, with my son much preferring Dominic the Donkey by Lou Monte. Merry Christmas!”

Sky UK is a member of Welcome to Yorkshire’s Y30 Club of Yorkshire-based business partners.