T-Mobile’s Business Push, Technology Advantages, and 5G Slicing with Daryl Schoolar

Full Transcript

Don Kellogg 0m10s

Hello, and welcome to the two hundred and fiftieth episode of the week with Roger, a conversation between analysts about all things telecom, media, and technology by Recon Analytics. I'm Don Kellogg, and with me as always is Roger Retner. Roger, how are doing?

Roger Entner 0m22s

I'm great.

Don Kellogg 0m24s

So Roger, this week we have the CEO of Verizon Consumer on with us, Sam Path, back on the pod to talk about how Verizon's aiming to set a new standard for customer care. Sam Path, welcome to

Guest Speaker 0m35s

the podcast. Two hundred and fiftieth podcast. Huge congratulations. Your podcast is as old as America is next year. So huge congratulations and happy birthday.

Guest Speaker 0m44s

Thank you. Thank you.

Roger Entner 0m45s

Thank you. And the state of the union is strong, right?

Guest Speaker 0m49s

State of the union is strong. The state of the telecom business is even stronger. Look, it's a great resilient category. So we're super happy to be in this category.

Roger Entner 0m57s

Yeah, and you're helping making it even stronger by improving customer service. And who can be against better customer service?

Guest Speaker 1m6s

Roger, it starts with listening to customers. I have two young kids, I tell them you need to have listening ears. Even in corporate America, you need to have listening ears. Customers tell you in plain English what they like and what they don't like. And now with technology, you just can access so much more customer feedback every day.

Guest Speaker 1m23s

So I'll give you a cool thing we do. Every morning at eleven a. M, I get a report on the sentiment and the key issues that we got from our customers over the last twenty four hours. And it's not the sampling. It's every single call that comes into a customer care gets transcribed, put into a Gen AI machine, and then we get a sentiment and a detailed cost analysis.

Guest Speaker 1m44s

That's amazing insight and I have it every day. These are some of the things we've done that's made us think customer experience in a very different light.

Roger Entner 1m51s

And so, how does that translate into making your customers' lives better?

Guest Speaker 1m57s

The first thing is we launched Verizon what we call customer champions. These are complex cases. When you have a complex case, whether it's a promo or a device got lost or a combination thereof of two things, you tend to have multiple calls, multiple call, multiple handoffs. And that's not a good experience. So today, we are basically launching something we have only for our top global enterprise customers, which is a case management system.

Guest Speaker 2m23s

You call in once, we take your details, we intake it, we go work it offline for you with the different departments we have or with third parties that we need to, and then we come back and status you along the way. You can status by text, by call, or just show up on the app, status will show, and we resolve it. Your problem is our problem. You just have to call us once. No one in the world offers this.

Guest Speaker 2m44s

We are really unique in this space and we're using technology to scale something that's only available to big customers to 72,000,000 lines on the postpaid side. So that's the first really big thing we are launching today.

Roger Entner 2m58s

So what else is happening? When we talked beforehand, you were like fixing a particular pain point like when packages are getting lost.

Guest Speaker 3m8s

And part of this is also a proactive, we're using agentic AI to do proactive work. I'll give you an example. We send packages back and forth, UPS and FedEx, new phone going to customers, old phones coming back, and some combination thereof. Packages get lost. And when packages get lost, it's quite a painful experience for us and for customers because there's a lot of back and forth.

Guest Speaker 3m29s

We've actually now tracked the package in real time, and when we know it's lost, we mark it as lost in the system, we open up a case automatically, and then start solving for it. Even before the customer knows it, that there's a problem, we know it because of our systems, and we start solving for it immediately. It's proactive, but we have multiple journeys that are gonna be agentic AI powered proactive journeys. You know, activation, you're trying to activate a phone. Somewhere along the process, it's not.

Guest Speaker 3m56s

We see it on the back end. Hey, let's get involved in it before even the customer realizes it. Porting is another one. When you port between carriers, it doesn't go always as smoothly. We see a problem proactively and monitor it.

Guest Speaker 4m7s

Another one is billing. You know, if you have a promotion that fell out, we see that the promotion fell out, it was supposed to be that it's not there on the bill, we actively work it. So using AgenTik AI to proactively go and spot problems, fix problems even before the customer sees it, that's a really cool capability that we've launched today.

Roger Entner 4m26s

The importance here is actually solving the customer's problems. Because a lot of customers still are iffy around AI, but when you tell them that, hey, I'm making your life better and I'm solving the problems before you actually know it, they're all up for it.

Guest Speaker 4m44s

AI for us is just a technology. It's mostly on the back end, and we use it to save customer time, solve customer problems, and give them a better experience. It's very difficult for customers to argue with any of those sort of things. We are very careful, know, it's just not technology. We deploy people as well.

Guest Speaker 5m0s

So it's common for people and technology. But to your point, it's all about saving time, better customer experience, and taking fallout out of the process.

Roger Entner 5m10s

And you're also launching your new app, My Verizon, right?

Guest Speaker 5m16s

It's a great app. I mean, it's the number one rated app in the App Store in our category. 5,300,000 reviews. So it's reviewed by more than three people. You know, it's like 5,300,000 people have reviewed the app.

Guest Speaker 5m27s

I would say three really cool things about the app. The first one is mobile and home are on the same app. It's very cool. As convergence, we spoke about it previously, our strategy reliance on mobile and home coming together. You have a single app right now, and that app very nicely connects to some of our subsidiary app, whether it's Smart Family, whether it's the home internet app.

Guest Speaker 5m48s

But it all starts with the My Verizon app. That's one. Second is saving center. The whole app is centered around the customer. We have a saving center, which is, look, we are in summer.

Guest Speaker 5m57s

I want to put money back in people's pocket to do summer things. And you go to the savings center in a single place, you can see all the different ways you can save money on Verizon services, third party services, and we recommend people to come there and start their journey there. The third piece is probably the best AI powered Verizon assistant in the world. We worked very, very closely with Google to develop this. They are at the cutting edge.

Guest Speaker 6m20s

We are at the cutting edge where the AI models, not general knowledge in the world, but your specific case. So for example, Roger, you come and say, hey, my bill went up. Why did my bill go up? We have micro models that learn why your bill went up and explain it in very clean English. Or you may say, I'm traveling to Italy, and like, oh, Italy is great.

Guest Speaker 6m40s

You need travel pass? Let's hook you up with it. It's very conversational. It uses graphics. It uses text.

Guest Speaker 6m45s

It uses pictures to make your whole story come alive. And you can do many, many journeys inside the Assistant itself. And it's got unlimited patience. It won't get tired, it'll work relentlessly, and it'll always be polite. So I think it's a game changer for us.

Guest Speaker 7m0s

It's launched in all our apps today. And I think you're gonna get higher satisfaction, and customers are gonna get their problem solved faster.

Roger Entner 7m8s

That's terrific. I think your customers are also using the app already more than I'm aware of anybody else.

Guest Speaker 7m16s

It's a good app. 80% of our customers download the app, use it. Now, what's interesting is I never want to force a customer to use the app. Some of my peers force you to download the app if they need an upgrade. I don't want to do that.

Guest Speaker 7m31s

Every customer has a unique journey. She can decide how she wants to do it. She can start at the website, go to the store, start at the website, go to the app, or call into one of our inside sales teams. I'm very ambivalent to where they go. What I want to do is have the best experience everywhere, let them choose.

Guest Speaker 7m48s

And people have different comfort levels with different channels. So I want to enable that comfort and just work on providing the best channel versus trying and steering people towards certain channels.

Roger Entner 8m0s

Yeah, I think like 60% of your customers are using the app every month, which I think is industry leading. And that's before the new app, right?

Guest Speaker 8m9s

Exactly, 80% download it and use it less than a month, but 60% use it every month. And it's a great place. And what we find is people who use the app have lower churn, they have higher satisfaction, both on service and on sales. So, our quality is to put more functionality in the app so people use it all the time. And because of that, that'll be a big driver of churn reduction for us.

Roger Entner 8m31s

Yeah, and you're adding also a lot more benefits for the customers in it. When we previously talked, you mentioned summer of love, which I thought it was a good quote. It's a better term than winter of discontent. You're also doing a lot of good things.

Guest Speaker 8m49s

Yeah, summer of love. Look, in Jersey today it was 102 degrees, so there's definitely the summer part of it. But, you know, we have MyAccess, which is our loyalty program. And what we find is, you know, instead of giving people $2 off a pizza or, you know, upgrade your popcorn from medium to large or, you know, I'll buy you a soda pop every fourth Wednesday, we decided to double down on bucket list events. We've given away 550,000 tickets to some of the best events on earth, NFL games, NBA games, concerts.

Guest Speaker 9m19s

Right now, we have Beyonce. We have done Taylor Swift. And these are bucket list events. We had a fan fest at Super Bowl last year, and we want to extend that. Today, we are dropping 35,000 prices, tickets to events, as well as gift cards and other things that we are dropping today at the store and our site.

Guest Speaker 9m36s

And our loyalty is based on customers having a good time, a memorable time, and then getting access to things that is not easy for them to get access to.

Roger Entner 9m46s

Yeah, no, I think that also makes a big, big difference. It's to show the appreciation to your customers for their loyalty.

Guest Speaker 9m54s

And loyalty has to be earned. We have a multi tier loyalty strategy. It starts with our value prop, which Verizon best value guarantee. It's a three year price lock on all our plans. Not selective, it's on all our plans.

Guest Speaker 10m7s

Then, when you cross sell products, mobile plus home, that adds to loyalty. Then we have some proactive loyalty programs. Then we have some reactive loyalty programs when we slip somewhere along the way and we have to recover the customer. And then we have My Access, which is access to some of the best events. So this is our loyalty framework.

Guest Speaker 10m24s

And we're doing a lot of work to enable this across all our channels.

Roger Entner 10m28s

Terrific. Well, I always think better customer service is better. And it's as American as apple pie, motherhood and apple pie and good customer service. And I think it's great that you're redoubling your focus, and you had already great customer service, and now you're making it even better.

Guest Speaker 10m48s

And we are not done yet. You know, every single day we are listening to customers. It's a good lesson for large companies to have, as I said, listening ears, listen to our customers. So every day we are getting feedback, we are tweaking our programs, and we are not done. This is not a one and done thing.

Guest Speaker 11m2s

We have a two year roadmap of different things that we're gonna drop. I want to be number one in experience and customer service in The US. And that's the goal. And there's nothing structurally that prevents us from getting there. And now we have more technology than we've ever had before.

Guest Speaker 11m18s

So I want to deploy that towards the purpose of becoming number one in customer experience in The US.

Roger Entner 11m24s

That's a great goal. Terrific. Thank you, Sampath, for coming. This is awesome. Really appreciate.

Roger Entner 11m31s

You're the first three time guest and excited to have you again. Congratulations to the launch.

Guest Speaker 11m38s

Thanks, Roger. Again, congratulations to you on your two fifty. It's pretty cool. I mean, the consistency and the command you have over the industry is awesome to see, and I look forward to 03/1950. Have an amazing summer.

Roger Entner 11m52s

Terrific. Thank you, Sam.

Don Kellogg 11m54s

Thank you, gentlemen. Roger, we'll talk to you next week.

Roger Entner 11m56s

Talk to you next week.