Verizon Enterprise Solutions Award Highlights Commitment to Customer Experience

Verizon Enterprise Solutions recently earned a prestigious honor: The 2016 World Class Briefing Program of the Year from the Association of Briefing Program Managers (ABPM). This is the industry’s highest honor and recognizes Verizon's overall excellence in management, customer experience, measurement, and planning.
Verizon operates five executive briefing centers located in: San Francisco, Ashburn, Va.; Basking Ridge, N.J.’ and Waltham, Mass.; as well as London.

The company also has four technical centers focused on network and IT capabilities in Miami, Pittsburgh, Cary, N.C., and Culpeper, Va. These centers can be completely customized to provide clients with exclusive access to Verizon's latest products and services, and the ability to directly collaborate with Verizon and other industry-leading technology companies on potential new, innovative technology solutions that transform industries and drive faster business results. Verizon hosts approximately 600 hundred customer briefings each year at these facilities.

Richard Williams, Director of Customer Experience for Verizon Enterprise Solutions, talked to Loyalty360 about this esteemed honor.

“In 2014 Verizon Enterprise Solutions (VES) established a central Customer Experience Strategy team to lead a cultural shift to put the customer at the center of every interaction with the company,” Williams explained to Loyalty360. “We focused on educating account teams on CX concepts such as journey mapping (how the prospect moves through the sales process) and experience design. These concepts were built on top of an already strong CX foundation that included customer feedback and closed loop follow-up. Taken together, all of this provides the business with the necessary tools and discipline to more effectively collaborate and improve the end-to-end customer experience.”

Williams noted that the shift toward a customer-centric approach has had a profound effect on the business.
“We routinely monitor end-to-end operational performance and we link operational metrics with loyalty measures, such as touch point satisfaction and overall account loyalty,” he said. “These metrics are readily available to leaders across all departments via internal reporting dashboards. As a result, we’ve seen significant and sustained lift in customer loyalty. Additionally, we’re integrating unstructured and unsolicited customer feedback, leveraging it as a deeper resource to facilitate experience redesign that matters. This includes involving customers in our planning and decision-making, and customer feedback on service calls to guide our actions.”

Experience-based differentiation is a critical step in the company’s evolution, Williams said.
“We obsess about customer needs and desired outcomes,” he explained. “We treat customer experience as a competence, not a function or a department. Delivering great customer experiences isn’t something that a small group of people can do on their own—everyone in the company must be fully engaged in the effort.”

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