Downward angle icon Downward angle icon. Verizon’s adoption of generative artificial intelligence is a step toward improving employee and customer productivity. SOPA Image Verizon is using generative AI to reduce the workload of high-volume business-related calls. AI can teach agents how to handle issues and summarize customer calls. This article is part of the “CXO AI Playbook,” a candid look at how business leaders are testing and using AI.
Verizon Communications is a technology and communications leader headquartered in New York City. The company serves consumers, small businesses and 99% of the Fortune 500 in more than 150 countries.
Situation analysis: What problem was the company trying to solve?
Devika Bhattacharya, chief technology solutions officer for Verizon Business, said Verizon receives 170 million calls from business and residential customers each year.
Questions from business clients, including global corporations, SMEs and public sector organisations, are often complex and span many subjects. She says these enquiries are often difficult for customer service agents and typically take time to research and resolve.
Bhattacharya said Verizon began building artificial intelligence tools in-house several years ago to identify patterns in business calls and enable agents to follow up with customers, helping to resolve their issues and keeping customer satisfaction high.
Last year, the company added another layer of generative AI to ease the burden on customer service representatives and help them answer customer questions faster.
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Verizon’s overall AI strategy is focused on three priorities: speeding up its internal processes (including customer service), enhancing its products with technology, and providing access to a high-speed network and robust computing capabilities to customers who are running their own in-house AI programs. The company also plans to expand its use of generative AI.
Devika Bhattacharya is chief technology solutions officer at Verizon Business. Courtesy of Verizon Business
To guide the strategy, Bhattacharya said Verizon has formed an AI council made up of executives from legal, IT, security, network, product development, consumer and business departments. He said the group wants to mitigate risks associated with AI deployments, with the goal of protecting customer and Verizon’s proprietary data and using data responsibly.
Verizon also released a set of AI principles to ensure the company uses AI responsibly in ways that protect data and prevent bias, she said.
Use of AI
Incorporating generative AI into a business-to-business customer service strategy will help agents answer questions and resolve issues faster, Bhattacharya said, adding that the AI system can quickly pull up a customer’s history, including devices, services, call history and visits to Verizon stores.
This means agents don’t have to spend time asking for background information because they already have it in front of them, she said. “This adds a layer of conversational capability and reduces the cognitive load on both the customer and the agent’s side,” she added.
Generative AI predicts the reason for a call based on a customer’s past needs and gives agents recommendations to solve the problem, Bhattacharya says, but the agent has the final say on whether a recommendation is appropriate and should be followed.
The technology also automatically summarizes calls and tracks follow-up actions, such as callbacks, which agents previously did manually.
“All this is enabled by AI to ensure a more seamless customer experience, faster resolution, accurate summaries and thorough follow-up,” Bhattacharya said.
Did it work?
Bhattacharya said it’s too early to share data on how generative AI has improved Verizon’s enterprise customer service, but he told Business Insider that the company expects its agents to predict the reason for a call 80% of the time based on a customer’s history, adding that with the help of AI, agents will be about 90% accurate in recommending a solution.
Still, Verizon continues to improve its AI models based on feedback from customer service agents, she said. The new customer service AI tool will be rolled out first as a managed pilot, with about 10 percent of agents using it. If there are positive results, a larger group of agents will start using it.
“It’s a continuum,” Bhattacharya said, adding that the goal is to reach an “accuracy level in the high 90s.”
She said generative AI can ease call center challenges and improve productivity. It can also help new agents get through training faster.
What’s next?
Verizon continues to leverage AI across its business, and Bhattacharya said the company is “on the verge” of using the technology for hyper-personalization in customer service.
That means offering each business customer highly curated products and services based on millions of data points collected about their usage, geography, call history and existing services, rather than making recommendations based on broad demographics, she said.
“Generative AI allows us to operate at scale and see each caller as a segment,” Bhattacharya said.
The goal, she said, is to use generative AI to make customer interactions as seamless as possible. “The telecommunications industry is a complex business,” she added, “so all of our work around AI is making everything simpler and more natural for our customers and our internal employees.”
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