Over 5 million customer interactions.

On today’s episode of Up To Speed Live, it’s all about the customer experience:

• Let’s talk Customer Service with Brian Higgins, Dory Butler and Vivek Gurumurthy
• This week, we brought the speed to the Indy 500

💬 A chat with the Customer Experience (CX) dream team.

If there is a common value that is demonstrated in every V Teamer, it’s the commitment to our customers. We are always looking for new and better ways to provide them with the best products, on the best network, with the best experience possible.

Today, SVP and Chief Experience Officer Brian Higgins, SVP of Customer Experience Dory Butler, and Consumer CIO Vivek Gurumuthy joined the show to bring you Up To Speed on how we’re using technology to turn our customers into our biggest fans.

▶️ Check out our video about the Customer Experience [00:55]

Our approach: We understand that every interaction is an opportunity to make a meaningful impact on people’s lives. We make customers feel that we see them, we understand them, and we’ve got them.

Our scale: We connect roughly 99% of the population and we interact with them on a daily basis to the tune of 200K store visits, 300K calls or chats to our agents and 5.4M interactions to our mobile app and our site.

Our range: We handle everything from purchasing new tech, to asking billing questions, to making calls, sending texts and checking out new products in our stores.

We rally around three key areas:

• Tackling pain points for our customers,
• Making our digital storefront and experience best in class,
• Creating new, exclusive products and experiences they can only get on Verizon.

We’re using new tech to help address these areas, especially creating new AI tools to help employees:

• With that in mind, the tools that we’re building use AI to help free up our front-line teams so they can focus on what they do best - making meaningful connections
• With tools such as Personal Research Assistant, Personal Shopper/Problem Solver, “Fast Pass” to resolution, and the Segment of Me, our front-line V Teamers can focus on building stronger connections with our customers.
• These tools are allowing us to:
  • Pair customers to the best available representative who can meet their specific needs,
  • Give our reps a head start on who the customer is and why they may be calling,
  • Put information right at their fingertips to answer questions quickly, and
  • Provide unique offers and products that are tailored exclusively for customers to proactively address their needs.

An example of a customer’s complete AI-powered experience

• Initial contact: Using the power of natural language processing, our chat and voice bots interact with the customers even before they may express an intent to initiate a call or chat themselves. They can understand complex problems and suggest optimal solutions.
• Getting to the right rep: If a customer needs a conversation with an agent, an AI powered tool intelligently routes the customer to an available agent with the right skills and knowledge to help.
• Smart conversation: Once a call lands with a rep, the customer insights such as intent and sentiment analysis are gathered and sent directly to the agent. Agents also have powerful tools like AI personal shopper/problem solver and research assistant at their disposal which help ensure all relevant information is in one place.
• Bottom line: As the teams continue to leverage generative AI and evolve their models, agents no longer need to pore through thousands of knowledge documents to find the right answer. Rather, the AI can do this task for them and inform the agent, allowing them to do what they do best, build meaningful connections with our customers.
• Why it matters? It matters to our customers. It matters to our front lines. It matters to our business and to our bottom lines. Getting it right means improved customer satisfaction, retention and revenue growth. We’re already seeing great progress across all our sales and service channels.

Learn more about our new AI-powered tools.

🏁 A fitting event for a company that loves speed …[10:38]

This weekend was the 108th running of the Indianapolis 500, at the famed Indianapolis Motor Speedway, or IMS for short.

Our best lap: Thanks to excellent VZ connectivity, data usage was up 12.5% from last year. We also upgraded the 5G network this year, nearly doubling the number of CBand nodes for a total of 71.

Setting the record across the board: Did you know that IMS is unique in that it has a permanent seating capacity of more than 250,000 seats? It is the highest-capacity sports venue in the world, and we have partnered for years to provide better connectivity to race fans. With 5G Ultra-Wideband, it’s not just fans that reap the benefits…race teams, and venue operations leverage our reliable, high-speed network to enhance the way they perform on the track and better serve the 300,000+ people who descend upon IMS.

A new partnership: VBG has officially launched a new video with the folks at Indianapolis Motor Speedway to talk about the impact of 5G, the power of partnership and how together, Verizon and IMS are changing the game for race fans today and for years to come.

▶️ Watch a video about this high-speed partnership. [11:58]

Click here for a transcript of the webcast.

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