Telecommunications giant Verizon is announcing a new suite of customer service experiences for consumers of its phone and internet offerings. Among other enhancements, Verizon customers now have access to an AI Customer Champion, which can handle complex issues and provide updates through an app, text or phone call, depending on their preferences.
“We are aspiring to set the standard for customer experience,” Sowmyanarayan Sampath, CEO of Verizon Consumer, told Newsweek. “We do a good job but I don’t think we stand out from our peers.”
Verizon expects these improvements to allow greater flexibility and customization in the customer experience, while taking advantage of opportunities available through emerging technology to address customer pain points.
“For example, you send your phone back. It gets lost in transit. We know it’s lost in transit. We don’t need the customer to call,” Sampath said. “We use an agentic framework to go automatically solve the case and then give them a credit.”
Sampath credits an improved ability to collect and analyze customer feedback for helping push the company in this direction. He said he reads customer emails every day but expanding the sourcing of customer feedback and using technology to summarize that feedback has allowed them to get a better view of what customers want.
“We get hundreds of thousands of calls into customer care every day. Every single one of those calls, we listen to it, we transcribe it, put it into an AI engine and at [11:00 a.m.], I get a report on what customers are telling us the day before,” he explained.
Within the Verizon app, AI is being used to customize and streamline the customer service experience. Sampath mentioned new innovations in agentic and generative AI that have enabled these added capabilities.
“We’ve taken a technology that we typically offer to our largest corporate customers and now offering to our consumer customers,” Sampath said, such as automated issue identification and case filing.
Verizon has also expanded its physical retail presence and call center hours with nearly 400 new stores in the United States over the last two years and 24/7 live chat support, in addition to longer hours of availability with live agents. The company said that 93 percent of customers now live within 30 minutes of a store despite a few location closures as well.
“Everyone else is going the other way,” Sampath said, in terms of physical footprint. “We’ve added 400 stores because we are a local brand at the end of the day, we want to be in the local community, and I don’t want to force customers down a certain path.”
The My Verizon app will also include AI-powered savings and assistant support, allowing customers to manage billing or account changes through a prompt-based interface.
“It’s a conversational thing,” Sampath said. “Just natural language. You ask questions, it answers, it gives you options that you can click.”
Verizon’s primary technology partner for the AI portion of these upgrades was Google, Sampath shared, growing an existing partnership between the two companies.
“We worked with Google to create, not large language models, but ‘small language models’ which basically are at your personal level,” Sampath said, speaking to the customization of service offered through the app. “You can go into a chat and say. ‘Why did my phone bill go up?’ It’ll tell you exactly why your phone bill went up.”
As he seeks to improve first-call issue resolution for customer service, Sampath said down the road he sees the AI chat as a better alternative to waiting for a live rep for simple issues.
“Very soon, you go to the chat and talk about your bill, it’ll actually be better than talking to a rep,” he said. Sampath also shared that the rate of customer issues resolved in the first call is around 90 percent, and that he’s hoping to get it to 95 percent as a result of these improvements.
Verizon’s investment in improved experience also includes people and policy components. It has expanded hours of live agent availability to 9 a.m. to midnight local time and is offering 24/7 live chat support. Sampath boasted that much of this technology did not exist a year ago, and that previous partnership with Google allowed them to build a custom offering faster.
“I think we’re the first carrier in the world to deploy [these technologies] at scale,” Sampath said.
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