A look inside Verizon Business Group’s AI-powered ‘centralized decisioning hub’

The Brief

Customers’ needs have changed over the last few years, with an increasing focus on wireless and telephonic remote connections. The VBG developed a real-time, AI-driven interactive solution to increase loyalty and reduce churn with an eye on growth that is sustainable. By evaluating and anticipating a customer’s needs and arbitrating the right set of offers for each customer, real-time at the point of contact, the program simplified the process for both the customer and the employee assisting them.

The Idea

By partnering with key stakeholders and working directly with the front-line reps, the VBG team developed a clear and attainable roadmap and set of program-level goals, including:

• Self-optimize offer campaigns to create loyalty, control revenue and reduce margin dilution.

• Enable consistent experiences across customer touchpoints and channels.

• Present contextually relevant and personalized offers to customers at the right time, with the right offer.

The project leveraged artificial intelligence and machine learning platforms, internal and external behavior, analytics and customer intelligence to serve business customers’ needs. The program has been recognized for speed of development, quick adoption, simultaneous launches in separate channels and speed in benefits realization in a very complex market segment. The ROI was three-times the investment within the first year, even while iterative development was in process.

The Results

An AI-powered guided save engine is a tool that integrates itself into call center and retail tools leveraging guided questions for the representatives in conjunction with customer behavior and intelligence to help determine the best solution to retain a customer who has asked to disconnect. The tool is also used to present offers and solutions to create loyalty by leveraging strategic upgrades, additional products and services and plan changes. It is delivered within the same sales flow and is agnostic to the system that is used. VBG integrated the powered guide save into two separate call center applications across two different teams and product sets to see how it would perform, focusing on use cases with the highest impact for the customer and the business. In the first nine months, the initiative was able to deliver the following :

• Best-in-class industry KPIs (33% offer acceptance by customers).

• Three large, complex business transformation efforts simultaneously, in record time.

• Remote development, launch, and adoption

Verizon’s commitment to providing its customers a great experience is unmatched. But with multiple customer journeys and thousands of offers available to each business customer, the experience was fractured. By creating a centralized decisioning hub that ingests data and intelligence about each customer’s preferences, that previously fractured experience has transformed into more productive, efficient and rewarding conversations between VBG’s customer service professionals and our customers. How the customer interacts with one system or person at Verizon is passed to the decisioning hub and the next interaction is contextual and personalized as a result. The hub can now leverage the latest in artificial intelligence and machine learning to help better learn and anticipate customers’ needs.

In turn, Verizon can better understand each business customer from the largest to the smallest, at both the account and individual levels. Unlike other companies that apply artificial intelligence and machine learning at the transaction level, the central decisioning hub makes strategic recommendations for better service, optimized billing, and holistic account wellness.

This campaign won at The Drum Awards for Marketing Americas 2023. Find out more about The Drum’s Global Awards program or head to our case studies hub to read more award-winning stories.