Delivering the next level of customer experience P R O J E C T PA R T N E R
Delivering the next level of customer experience WRITTEN BY A n d rew Wo o d s PRODUCED BY A n d y L l oyd
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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… ommunication 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
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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 6
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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 w w w.v e r iz o n . co m
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Welcome
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Unifying the Prospect Journey with Salesforce When Verizon Wireless decided to launch a unified omnichannel customer journey it looked to Salesforce for the solution. We spoke to John Carney, Salesforce’s SVP Industries, Communications and Media, to see how The Salesforce Customer 360 helped the biggest wireless carrier in the US… Telecommunications is a notori-
calls and SMS into those newer
seamless customer experience.
ously competitive and disruptive
services. So, that existential threat
Employees benefit from integrated
industry. “Customer expectations
of being relevant as a brand to a
systems and intelligence gleaned
(in telecom) overall have changed
consumer is real. ‘How do I become
from every interaction. Salesforce’s
dramatically because of their expe-
more relevant to the consumer and
Einstein crunches the data and
riences in a digitally native world,”
build loyalty to that brand?’”
makes recommendations to scale
Carney explains. “In telecom the
Carney continues, “Our Unify
the impact of sales and service representatives.
average net promoter score, which
the Prospect Journey solution
is a key measurement of customer
layers on top of a Service Provid-
satisfaction, is in the single digits.
er’s legacy systems to integrate
points saved as data points in
When you look at the digital native
their billing, order management,
Salesforce, that give you an in-
companies like Amazon, you see
and retail systems with customer
credible amount of information and
net promoter scores in the 80s and
data. That helps create a single
insight about how consumers nav-
above. There’s a large gap between
customer profile and experience
igate your company,” Carney says.
customer satisfaction and desired
across all consumer touchpoints.
“That can be used to drive a better
experience in telecom. It’s driving
For example, say you were shop-
experience, drive cross-sell, up-sell,
urgency for them to transform,
ping on a wireless carrier’s web-
improve conversion, improve loyalty,
close the gap, and continue to grow.”
site, looked at a few phones, and
and drive costs out of the business.
for some reason you abandon
It’s exciting to see how we are
disrupted by substitutes,” Carney
the cart… What happens when
helping telecom providers reshape
explains. “A big part of the revenue
you walk into the retail store?
the industry. Companies that have a
stream used to be tied to traditional
Most of the time you still have
rich understanding of their custom-
communication services, such as
to start all over again, because
ers, and build their business around
voice and messaging. Today, it’s
there’s no connectivity between
them, are the ones who are likely
shifted from about 70% voice and
the channels or between the
going to become the leaders of
messaging to about 70%-plus data.
staff in the retail environment or
our industry. A platform like Sales-
Services and apps enabled by mo-
customer care environment. This
force helps build true agility into
bile devices, like social media, video
is where we can help.”
the business and reshape what
“The wireless market is being
chat, and messaging apps, have
Salesforce creates a single view
“You’ve got those interaction
the customer journey looks like
enabled consumers to shift their
of customer activity connecting
from lead to loyalty. We’re here to
usage away from traditional phone
channels together to create a
help you bring it to life.”
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 10
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“ I see us continuing to improve these experiences while increasing convenience for the customer in ways we haven’t even thought of yet” JOHN WALKER Consumer Group’s Executive Director of Sales Experience Ve r i z o n
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 faceto-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
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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 12
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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 w www.v w w.v e r ize or iz n .oco n .m co m 13 13
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, 14
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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
John Walker Consumer Group’s Executive Director of Sales Experience Verizon John Walker is a highly dedicated professional with extensive technology leadership experience in Network, IT, and Omni Marketing Operations and has delivered $3B in Rev Gen and Cost Saving value over the past 4 years. John has built long standing relationships and a reputation based on trust, professionalism and delivery. He serves as an active mentor and believes in the power of integrated teams. John promotes world-class collaboration as the key to winning in an environment characterized by change. John loves a challenge and is energized by both creating and optimizing processes. He empowers employees and encourages them to “fly the plane” and take charge of their projects, not look for top-down directives. He has been relentless and incredibly impatient with projects, while being patient and supportive of the people who deliver them.
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“ There can be a huge gap between what you imagined you could do and what you can effectively implement and execute against” JOHN WALKER Consumer Group’s Executive Director of Sales Experience Ve r i z o n
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. 16
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“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.”
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