Verizon dials up customer support with automation

For a wireless carrier, customer service is paramount. It can determine whether customers continue rewarding you with their business or defect to another carrier.

Verizon was known for its customer service—a key driver for top-line revenue—but was concerned about increasing costs in the contact center’s operations as well as a reduction in the firm’s customer service metrics. The center and its thousands of employees were fragmented across functional groups, technologies, and geographies. The company knew they had to cut costs and increase operational efficiency while continuing to provide the right level of customer service and classic business process reengineering was not delivering the hoped for results.

It was time to transform the contact center from a cost into a competitive advantage and it would require a new way of thinking.

Our advisors brought a fresh perspective to Verizon’s operating model which included leveraging digital, data and analytics, and intelligent automation. Results included:

• refined sourcing for contact center support

• opportunities to obtain and analyze data to make business decisions

• organizational realignment to enable change

• significant costs savings and revenue opportunities

• improvements in satisfaction

• identification of intelligent automation solutions

• redesigned desktops for contact center representatives.

Our team has a long history as a trusted advisor to Verizon, which asked us to provide leadership toward a complete, sustainable solution for its contact center challenges. We conducted a holistic assessment of its operations and culture, including its organizational structure, technology, sourcing, performance management, and processes. Our experienced, cross-functional team proposed a creative, collaborative approach that ultimately led to changes in people, processes and technology. Our involvement included:

• a comprehensive assessment that featured in-depth discussions with key executives, interviews with many employees, and multiple-day visits to eight contact centers where we sat side-by-side with representatives answering customer inquiries

• a deep-dive analysis of customer service data, which provided rich information about the issues and technical problems that caused customers to call the contact centers, as well as the causes of operational inefficiencies

• identifying the right level of service that the company should provide its customers while retaining their business

• development of a business case that provided detailed calculations of the cost, time, effort and return on investment for changes to both customer and employee experiences

• identifying opportunities to redesign the desktops of contact center employees as well as introduce intelligent automation to streamline service 

• providing data-driven insights that enabled the business to make decisions about issues ranging from resources to performance agreements

• providing tools for organizational realignment to enable successful change.

Digitize the business

Automation provides tremendous opportunities to deliver the right level of customer service. Using robust data and analytics to fully understand customer experiences and expectations can translate into the delivery of profitable customer service through digitization of the desktop, use of assisted virtual agents, and the automation of front, middle, and back office activities.

It takes a village to transform a business

A cross-functional team with a broad, diverse level of experience and expertise is crucial to develop creative, holistic, and sustainable solutions to meet the specific needs of specific businesses.

Create value centers

Customer contact centers should not only deliver the right level of customer care, but should drive value for the business. Our team of advisors brought a deep understanding of where value was created to enable Verizon’s contact centers to deliver the best service.