- Verizon Consumer CEO Sowmyanarayn Sampath teased the Project 624 initiative in an ambiguous social media message back in April
- The message contained seven words and one number: "Project 624. All about the customer. Coming soon."
- What’s it all mean? Fierce got the skinny straight from Sampath
Go big or go home. That’s the strategy Verizon appears to be taking with the overhaul of its customer service strategy.
How big? Big enough for Verizon Consumer CEO Sowmyanarayn Sampath to provide his email (s.sampath@verizon.com) address for customers to contact him directly if their experience falls short in any way. The email is included at the bottom of a full page ad running in today’s editions of the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and USA Today.
And no, it’s not some phony corporate placeholder address. “It’s actually my email address,” he told Fierce. “We have tools and people to help me with it, but it’s important that customers know that they are being listened to.”
As a parent of two kids, he often tells them to put on their “listening ears.” Well, a corporation as big as Verizon can have “corporate listening ears,” too, he said. “We’ve been listening to customers in a way that I don’t think we’ve done before, but definitely our peers haven’t done.”
The new initiative, which Sampath teased on social media back on April 24, is packed with several key components: dedicated experts assigned to tackle customers’ most complex issues, 24/7 live support with expanded call hours, hundreds more retail stores and, of course, cutting-edge AI with a big emphasis on Google’s expertise.
AI already features heavily in Verizon’s customer experience organization. Sampath said he receives a report every morning about the prior day’s customer sentiment, a gauge of the overall vibe they’re getting based on customer interactions. The report is generated using AI to review every single call that comes through the customer service centers.
Verizon: Long time in the works
Asked if this is a customer retention move because Verizon lost 289,000 postpaid phone subscribers in Q1, he said Verizon typically loses subscribers in the first quarter of every year and this year was no different. Not to mention they needed more than a few months to pull all this together.
Indeed, Verizon’s push to improve the customer experience (CX) started more than a year ago, when it named Brian Higgins as the company’s first chief customer experience officer and hired former Walmart executive Dory Butler as SVP of CX.
The new CX programs have been operating on a trial basis for more than a month and close to 90% of the most problematic customer support cases are getting resolved in less than 24 hours; the goal is to get that to 100%, Higgins told Fierce.
In customer care, the vast majority of calls are handled by an automated system and answered right then and there on the phone, but there’s a portion of calls with tricky issues that take more time to work out. Verizon created what it’s calling a Customer Champion team, where “we’re putting our most senior representatives on the line and on your case to make sure it gets resolved,” Higgins said.
“The important part is that we’ll make sure that we own the issue,” he said. “It shouldn’t be on the customers.”
About 100 million individuals visit a Verizon store in a given year and more than 50% of customers who engage with Verizon do so at a store, according to Higgins. Verizon added about 400 stores to ensure that more than 90% of individuals across the U.S. can get to a Verizon store within 30 minutes or less, he said.
Analysts weigh in on Verizon’s strategy
Sam McHugh, head of telecom equity research at BNP Paribas Exane, sees Verizon’s moves as small incremental changes and not hugely disruptive to the wider industry. But even small changes could help reduce churn in the back half of 2025, he said in a note for investors today.
Customer service is the sixth most important reason people cite for leaving their mobile carrier, according to Roger Entner, founder of Recon Analytics.
“It’s good for everybody when you’re treating your customers well and customer service is as good as humanly possible,” he told Fierce. “Verizon is putting the groundwork down on making this really good. This is another differentiator against cable.”
Asked how much of this is a reaction to what T-Mobile has been doing with its network and making claims about “best network,” Sampath said Verizon doesn’t look to the competition for inspiration.
“We look to our customers for inspiration every single day, and customers tell us what we want to do,” he said.
The idea is to apply the same high standard it set for the network to the customer experience.
“We have the No. 1 network irrespective what people say,” he said. “Today we want to set the standard for customer experience. We are laying down the standard and a higher bar for what good customer experience looks like.”