(Credit: Verizon)
Verizon Wireless would prefer you call its customer-service line less often—but only because it hopes to make repeated calls about the same, still-unresolved problem unnecessary.
Verizon says new customer-support changes announced Tuesday are "designed to empower customers with easier, more personalized support." They start with having a "Customer Champion" field your query until it's resolved, updating you on their progress via your choice of calls, texts, or notifications in the My Verizon app.
Verizon's press release mentions that these new dedicated experts will employ systems built on Google's Gemini AI. This is not Verizon's first foray into using AI in customer service: In 2020, it began using Google's Cloud Contact Center Artificial Intelligence to help support reps answer customer questions.
Verizon is expanding its phone support hours from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. to 8 a.m. to midnight, with chat available 24 hours a day. The release further notes that almost 400 US stores have opened over the last two years, and 93% of the population is within 30 minutes of one of those locations.
Verizon is also updating the My Verizon app with additional AI in its Verizon Assistant and Savings Boost features. The latter addition would be helpful if it not only advised subscribers about relevant promotions and discounts but also suggested cheaper plans that better matched their usage than older, now-obsolete offerings, but Verizon did not clarify if Savings Boost can do that.
The company's sales pitch for all of this includes prizes such as free concert tickets to Beyonce, Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, and other acts via its Verizon Access platform for mobile customers, as well as the old-school technique of full-page newspaper ads.
The latter, running in the New York Times, USA Today, and the Wall Street Journal, consists of a letter to customers from Verizon's consumer CEO Sowmyanarayan Sampath. "Across the industry, customer service hasn't evolved the way it should," he writes. "That's why at Verizon, we've taken a different path — one built entirely around you."
Writing "You're not a customer number or a case file," Sampath invites customers who feel short-changed by Verizon to email him directly. "If we ever fall short — I want to hear about it, so we can get better," he writes, followed by his address: s.sampath@verizon.com. (RIP to his inbox.)
Verizon isn't the first carrier to stress customer service as a differentiator. In 2018, T-Mobile announced a "team of experts" reinvention of its own customer-care efforts. But it's not clear that customer support makes as big of an impression on people as lower rates, to judge from recent third-party surveys.
For example, a report released in May by the American Customer Satisfaction Index found that Verizon scored worse than two of the prepaid services it owns, Straight Talk and Tracfone. And in PCMag's latest Readers' Choice picks, released in March, Verizon's score of 7.2 out of 10 was well behind Tracfone's 8.0 and the 8.9 of another Verizon-owned prepaid option, Visible.