We caught up with Verizon Consumer Group’s Executive Director of Sales Experience John Walker to discuss the telco’s transformation of its customer journey…
Communication technology companies exist in highly competitive and increasingly disruptive waters. With the technological landscape constantly shifting, and customer expectation following suit, the journey a company offers both its clients and its staff, has to be smart and agile across all channels of engagement and Verizon is always working to stay ahead of the curve on that front.
The largest wireless
provider in the US, Verizon is a telecommunications giant with its 4G
LTE network covering approximately 98% of the States. The company has
transformed its customer journey, while boosting revenue in the process, in an omni-channel offering that has reshaped its sales strategy. Verizon Consumer Group’s Executive Director
of Sales Experience across those channels is John Walker and it’s his job to
examine the shopping path and the process of shopping in a bid to provide a
greater experience for both the customer and the sales team.
“We’re moving on,” Walker explains, “from having a channel-focused distribution
strategy to a customer-journey focused strategy. We’re flipping our model. It’s a big change because we’ve operated by
channel very successfully for years. We know that changing our operating model
and building our distribution strategy around the customer is the right thing
to do, because we’ve seen how customers engage with us. The average sale takes around 9 days and
involves 2-3 touch points, often times more.
We want to connect those interactions for our customers.”
Walker has been a
part of Verizon since the start, beginning at Bell of Pennsylvania, before
moving to Bell Atlantic Mobile Systems which later became a joint venture with
Vodafone and Verizon (a subsidiary of Verizon Communications). His experience
has played witness to dramatic changes across Verizon’s operations and
offerings. His latest role is newly established, and directly addresses the
ever-shifting digital landscape and the customer journey it can inspire.
During the fourth quarter of 2016, Verizon made a decision to adopt an
omni-channel approach to its retail environment. Salesforce had been
successfully adopted for its B2B offerings, and so it was seen as a suitable
aid to the consumer customer. “We wanted to see what we could do for the
consumer customer and how we could improve the experiences for retail
efficiency in our (2,300 US) stores, to avoid cold calling customers, which was
not ideal for our sales reps or customers. We had a practice of pulling sales
reps off the floor when it was not very busy and have them call a list of
prospects provided by our CRM team. One of the problems was that we didn’t have
data about what was happening on those calls, how effective they were, or how a
customer responded. It was a black hole. So, we wanted to solve both an
operational and experiential problem,” he explains.
The Salesforce system was built around a holistic omni-channel experience that leveraged personalization by tying people together with use cases based on online shopping behavior. Verizon would see a large number of people start online, only to fail to finish the transaction. They wouldn’t buy. “So, we connected them with a person and an offer to help,” says Walker. “It was an opportunity to tie the digital experience together with a person and to build confidence in the online purchase. An offer of assistance is a great way to connect a digital and physical shopping experience and a great means of personalization. If that offer makes a customer more confident in their purchase, and our results have shown that it does, they’ll likely also purchase more, and our results show that too. We didn’t introduce a level of information about the customer or personalization to the reps that was creepy. Customers have grown to expect a company to know what he or she is looking at on the company website. That’s the level of information we share with our reps, nothing more, because we respect our customers’ privacy and at the same time want to meet their expectations that ‘Verizon remembers’ interactions they’ve had with Verizon systems and people. If you take it too far, people can understandably get uncomfortable with it.”
The Salesforce system was chosen to provide a smoother transition for both
customer and rep. “We kept our personalization at a level of ‘Here’s an
individual, close to you, that can provide greater confidence to you in what
you’re doing digitally or face to face.’ And you know, there are some customers,
naturally, that said, ‘No thanks’ or wouldn’t respond. But for the rep, instead
of getting a list of 250 people to cold call, he/she would receive a list of
people who said they’d like to meet. I mean, that’s a dramatically different
experience for that rep and for those customers. Because now when the customer
comes into the store, instead of saying, ‘Hey, I need help,’ they’re saying,
‘Hey, I’m here to see Samantha because I got a text message from her that said,
‘Hey, Andrew, I saw you left some great things in your cart. I’m free at two
o’clock on Thursday or any other time that’s convenient for you. Are you
interested in some help?’ We don’t engage any employees until the customer
responds. And then the rep would actually get that information and be
anticipating the customer’s arrival.
Anytime you can connect a digital experience with a face-to-face
experience in a way that makes that customer feel special, is a win. It’s a win
for the customer and it’s a win for the business and it builds trust and
ultimately drives sales.”
With large-scale
digital transformations, it can be very easy to spend huge amounts of cash on
unnecessary systems, software and the implementation thereof, and so expert
consultancy is always a must. Verizon pulled Deloitte Digital in to help with
the execution of the Salesforce system and to work with its IT teams in order
to get the experience they needed. Although Verizon had experience of working
closely with Salesforce there were still risks attached. “There can be a huge
gap between what you imagined you could do and what you can effectively
implement and execute against in a given timeframe,” Walker explains. “We were
going to have to integrate with a lot of legacy systems, and despite having a
truly world-class IT department we had virtually no experience integrating or
configuring the modules of Salesforce needed for our consumer
implementation. With Deloitte’s
expertise, we were able to get the platform up and running and into production
in 12 to 15 weeks. It was remarkably fast, and we did that because we said,
‘Look, we can keep working this until it’s perfect and then launch it and find
out whether or not our assumptions about customer and rep behavior are right or
not. Or we can get something into the
hands of the people that are going to use it and have them guide us on that
development going forward.’ So, it was very much an agile approach, and the
decision to operate in this manner turned out to be critical to our success.”
Walker and his team are buoyed by the success of the new system and view it as
one of the most successful multi-vendor projects Verizon has done. “We exceeded
our business case considerably. One measure of success would be the fact that
our close rate grew deep into double digits and the average sale was almost 20%
more than the sales closed without our Salesforce.com solution. Beating the business case was a really good
step. Let’s face it, there are a lot of people in any business who propose
solutions and build business estimations about the value they’re going to
create. This one outperformed our business case considerably and that’s the
most fun. And you know, having a strategy, executing against it and having
success, at the scale that we were able to do it, is not something people often
get an opportunity to do in their career. It was incredible. Just a tremendous
team of people.”
Although Verizon’s
operations and offerings are deeply rooted in harnessing new technological
systems and innovations, it is still people driving those transformations.
“People are everything. Look, you can have great processes and great
technology, but if you don’t have great people willing to roll up their sleeves
and just collaborate… That was one of the great things about this team. If you
saw this team, working together with Deloitte, you wouldn’t know who worked for
Verizon and who worked for Deloitte because it was just one team with a
tremendous commitment. They consistently figured out how to get things done in
a very tight timeframe with the intended results. We had people on the team
that knew our internal systems and how they connected very, very well. They
were critical to the implementation. Kathleen
Casey, Cynthia O’Dell, Vince Serrano and our field operations leads all played
significant roles on the team in our success. Kathleen was our chief innovator,
our idea engine, and Cynthia and Vince both brought Salesforce and technical
implementation skills that helped us get through some difficult periods. And the folks that Julie Miller, our Deloitte partner brought to
the table like Kris Tzankov, Matt Fisher and others, understood Salesforce and
what it could do, and understood integration in a way that was special.”
Verizon’s
relationship with Deloitte is ongoing and for good reason. “They just keep
adding value for our business,” says Walker rather matter-of-factly. “My
expectation would be that we continue to find ways to work with Deloitte
because of that. The intent and strategy for the implementation of Salesforce
was for them to get us off the ground and on our feet and for us to eventually
take over. And we’re working towards that. But again, they’re still involved
because they’re continually accelerating our progress. They bring speed, not
just to platform operation, but to our team, which is accelerating the value
realization from the platform.”
Verizon’s adoption of Salesforce is clearly hitting the right notes
for Walker. “Salesforce is a platform that is constantly being developed. You
constantly get additional capability that you don’t have to build internally,
so you can focus on your business instead. Because, by the way, it’s an
extraordinarily rich platform. You can do just about anything you can imagine
on it. And with the new capabilities that are being created, it goes from a scenario
where you’re trying to build a platform that does everything your business can
do to getting your business to leverage all the capabilities that are already
built in, so it becomes not how fast can your IT department move, but how fast
can you move your business.”
With Verizon being the kind of company it is with acquisitions and new revenue
streams coming up all the time, the Salesforce system needs to adapt to every
change in operations. “We haven’t found anything we’ve been unable to adapt
to,” Walker enthuses. “In fact, I see it becoming at least an industry
standard. But more than that, I see customer experience becoming, as it has
already begun to become: a driving factor in how we roll out products and
interact with our customers. And how we honor and respect our customers’ time
and how we empower them by creating convenience.
“When I hear the term ‘digital transformation’, I cringe, because digital
transformation is focused on technology. Whereas the focus needs
to be on convenience for the customer.
That’s the kind of power technology can deliver. But, if you think, ‘I’m going to create
amazing digital transformation’ it will take you to a different place than if
you start out thinking ‘I’m going to create the most amazingly natural,
convenient experience I can for this customer’; it will drive you to a
fundamentally different solution. Both approaches may well be delivered on a
handset because of the power, ubiquity and convenience our network offers. But
the team that imagines the customer at every step of the journey is going to
deliver better results. With the data
speeds and low latency we’ll deliver with true 5G services, I see Verizon
continuing to improve our experiences while increasing convenience for the
customer in ways we haven’t even thought of yet.”
