Verizon Connect: January 2022 - December 2024
Verizon Connect
Reveal is a B2B IoT Telematics SaaS solution,
sold across North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific
This case study highlights an intraprenurial effort undertaken to evolve the customer experience at Verizon Connect from one that was the primary contributor of customer churn to one that aimed to become a strategic point of differentiation in a highly fragmented global telematics marketplace.
In our time at Verizon Connect, we delivered a 60% increase in customer sentiment, a 37% increase in Net Promoter Score, and reduced churn by 30%. Not only will I highlight the value of the service design team as a whole, but I will show a few select projects to demonstrate how my practice fits into the larger narrative of the business to improve customer value.
my role
Senior Customer Experience Strategist
(aka Service Designer)
our team
Amelia Diggle - Lead
Seoung Yeon Han - UXD
Sean Svendsen - SD
Clara Villa - SD
about verizon connect
Verizon Connect, part of Verizon Business Group, is a global leader in telematics and fleet management solutions, empowering businesses to track, analyze, and optimize fleets in real time. Through IoT technology and enterprise-grade software, Verizon Connect transforms data into actionable insights through its integrated platform (Reveal) to help companies improve fleet efficiency, driver safety, route planning, and remain compliant. Customers come from industries ranging from construction to logistics to field services. Verizon Connect equips businesses with tools to streamline operations, positioning itself as a strategic partner in the rapidly evolving telematics field.
about the service
design team
In 2022, a fledgling, scrappy, and optimistic service design team was born and began to introduce customer-centric design thinking into every area of the business. We were a small team of 5 spread across 3 continents.
With our customers as our north star, we leveraged our strengths, along with a bit of ambition, grit, and fortitude, and began collaborating across the business. This began in small projects and grew to become one where service design was embedded into every major strategic initiative. By December 2024, the team helped the business achieve a 30% churn reduction from efforts across 2 years of work.
A few of the complexities we faced included:
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Inclusion of service design: Winning sponsorship, building and maturing a team, establishing credibility, & influencing new ways of working.
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Leadership Changes: Navigating annual leadership changes, aligning with various executives, and ensuring work fit with different executive priorities.
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Conflicting Internal Priorities: Proving service design’s value and demonstrating ROI within an agile product centric organization.
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A Global Team on Three Continents: Overcoming time zone differences while dividing responsibilities across the customer journey—such as focusing on discovery, implementation, and support.
emily, what did you do?
As the first member of the team, I jumped in head first by co-facilitating enterprise wide workshops across the customer journey.
As time went on, I began to find my "home" within the delightfully messy and vitally important Support Journey. The best support experience is the one you never had, and, it's not "if," but "when" something goes awry. In this journey stage, I partnered upstream to prevent problems from occurring and partnered across our support teams to streamline tools and processes to make it as frictionless as possible for our customers when that help is needed.
To continue to increase our value to our customers, we want to help them be as successful as they can be using our platform and partner for growth. I went on to design key elements of a new customer facing role at Verizon Connect, the Strategic Account Manager, as well as tools, processes, and documentation to help set these SAMs up for success.
As a human working on a team and with other people:
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I sought to improve the customer literacy of our employees on the role they play in creating customers' E2E journey.
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I hosted cross-functional events to elevate user research and align teams.
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I created spaces for our teams to align and collaborate when things felt really messy to try to create a "home base."
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I looked for opportunities to create synergies between teams and made it a priority to share and elevate the work of teams across the business
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I learned how to hold space for teams and people who don't always see eye-to-eye to determine constructive paths forward.
what did I learn?
I think service design is a really helpful framework for innovating in complex corporate ecosystems to improve customer experiences. However, I do not think service design is the end all be all way.
I first took this job to get really good at workshop facilitation. I stayed because there were so many opportunities to develop my skillset and generate impact
In my first year, I was largely focused on service design across the end-to-end customer journey. We were a nascent team learning and iterating to discover where and how we could add the most value. During my first 6 months, we led a series of enterprise-wide to-be workshops which resulted in a 2026 experience vision. I went on to conduct an ecosystem assessment, both of which were presented back to the executive team.
4 of the 5 recommendations from the Ecosystem Assessment were implemented as programs in the following year.
My first success was identifying a gap in how frontline agents were equipped when supporting customers. I aligned the team to focus on key bottlenecks to improve operational efficiency, improve the employee experience, and therefore decrease time to customer case resolution. I prototyped an MVP and partnered for delivery for a new agent-facing case intake tool. During this project, we did the whole end-to-end design from user testing, prototyping, executive communications, partnering with devs, etc.
My second major success came when I influenced executives to pursue a $5M contact center transformation instead of a singular channel solution.
To get to this point, I analyzed case data and self-service support experiences where I then recommended solutions to the executive team. This propelled me into leading a technology vendor evaluation across both chat and contact center providers.
Once given the green light, I saw another big problem with with our operational model as a team to organize and deliver the work for the contact center enhancement.
I campaigned, designed, and executed a global cross-functional workshop with 20 senior and executive leaders to accelerate and align on our support strategy and roadmap. During this time, I assisted with the formation of a cross-functional team and supported the team through technology implementation.
By the end of 2024, the contact center and digital support teams achieved a 55% increase in utilization of digital self-service support tools from where we started in 2023. A major accomplishment!!
Throughout 2024, I worked on aspects of support service delivery to improve customer support experiences such as: phone line consolidation and new IVR menu, design of new chat intents & workflows, design strategy for customer self-service portal, and more.
Later in the year, I was selected to work on a (then) confidential project to shape a new frontline role, the Strategic Account Manager (200+), before the change was announced and implemented. I was a strategic partner in shaping the role and then partnered with change management through to delivery.