- Verizon's chief customer experience officer spoke with Fierce Network about GenAI
- The company is using GenAI to tailor offers for subscribers
- It's also using GenAI for customer service use cases
Since Sowmyanarayan Sampath became the CEO of Verizon Consumer Group in March 2023, Verizon has revamped its customer experience processes. And during that revamp, the company has also jumped on the generative AI (GenAI) bandwagon. It’s implementing GenAI in both customer service as well as sales processes.
Before getting to the GenAI details, Fierce Network asked Brian Higgins, Verizon’s chief customer experience officer, if the company is going to continue making it impossible for customers to call their local stores and speak with a human. Higgins said there’s a chance that could change. “We take a look at these things often,” he said. “We made decisions about the availability of customer care on the store floor. We constantly take a look at that. Even though that’s the experience we have now, it may change later on.”
Now, getting to its GenAI work, the company has at least four new tools that it says will “make it simple to do business with Verizon and help reduce the cognitive load on store and customer service partners.” The tools are designed with a human in the loop.
Personalized sales and marketing
For years, companies have been talking about personalized marketing, and we’ve seen some of that with Google ads and with Netflix recommendations. And Verizon has also been using AI for a tool it calls Segment of Me, which attempts to treat each customer in a personalized manner by offering products specifically suited for them.
Higgins explained that Segment of Me uses customer data to tailor specific offers based on what the customer may like.
“If you go into a store and then later call into customer care and then go into digital, we take all the insights and tailor a specific offer for them,” said Higgins.
Verizon has been using artificial intelligence for quite a while, and it has had this tool, but when generative AI sprang onto the scene about two years ago, the company began tapping its capabilities. Now, when a customer looks at Verizon’s offers online, what they see may be different than what other customers see.
“The actual merchandise you see, and the copy, will be tailored directly to you,” said Higgins. “Also, the images you see, as well, will be personalized. Later on, help videos will be personalized.”
Another similar GenAI tool is Verizon’s Personal Shopper, which can instantly analyze a customer’s profile and help employees get a head start on who the customer is and what they need. Verizon says the tool has already cut customer transactions time down by two to four minutes.
Higgins explained that when a customer visits a store for a phone upgrade, it can be a fairly lengthy process for them to pick a device, decide which color they prefer and choose the amount of memory they want. Personal Shopper uses probability models that Verizon built internally to predict what the customer will prefer.
“We’ve got the largest database of consumers within wireless retail,” said Higgins.
The database includes details from any previous interactions with the customer.
Personal Shopper then synthesizes that data to identify the next best action for a specific customer. “It becomes one click for the rep,” said Higgins. “If the customer wants to modify they can. Generally, we get that right north of 85% of the time.”
Verizon has active trials of Personal Shopper in its retail stores, now. Then it will roll out more broadly to all stores, then customer care, and then digital.
The technology has mainly been built in-house with a bit of help from some smaller vendors, said Higgins.
GenAI for customer service
The most common use of GenAI within telcos, so far, is for customer service. We’ve all been “helped” by bots. But let’s hope bot technology improves, because so far it hasn’t been very helpful at all.
For its part, Verizon has a personal research assistant to aid customer service reps.
Higgins said the tool has taken the 10,000 knowledge-based articles within Verizon and ingested them into a large language model (LLM). When a service rep is speaking with a customer, the rep can do a quick keyword search and receive a response in a conversational format. More than 40,000 Verizon reps are using personal research assistant today.
Higgins said Verizon partnered with Google on creating the GenAI tool, which uses Google's Contact Center AI (CCAI) that’s tied back to Google’s Gemini product.
“We ingest everything that Google provides and marry it with our data,” he said. “The data does not go back to Google at all. It generates all responses here in Verizon.”
Amdocs has a personal-assistant-like tool called “Amaiz.” Recently, Amdocs said that when a customer calls with a question about their bill, it typically takes about 15 minutes for the customer service rep to review their bill history and come up with an answer. Using the Amaiz platform, that time can be cut down to 30 seconds.
Asked how much time Verizon’s personal assistant is saving, Higgins said, “We’re actually assessing it right now.” He said it could save 20%-30% of time for normal tasks.
Finally, Verizon has a GenAI tool called “Fast Pass,” which pairs customers with the best available customer care rep to meet their specific needs. So, if a customer is calling about international roaming or billing, for example, that customer will be paired with a rep that’s knowledgeable about the topic, rather than a generalist.
Overall in terms of Verizon's innovations with GenAI, Higgins said the company has a “healthy workforce” for GenAI and “no shortage of partners that are providing new services.”
“We’re in a strong position that’s been working on customer data for many years,” he concluded.