Interview
The Gist
- Integrating sales and experience enhances customer satisfaction. Combining sales and experience roles allows Verizon to drive growth while ensuring a seamless customer experience across channels.
- Data-driven decisions improve customer experience. Verizon uses a combination of NPS, interaction scores and employee satisfaction metrics to continuously refine and improve customer journeys.
- AI plays a key role in future eCommerce strategies. Verizon is leveraging AI to streamline processes and enhance both employee and customer experiences, with plans to expand its use in meaningful, customer-focused applications.
In this conversation, Dom Nicastro and Phil Burrows explore the integration of sales and experience roles at Verizon. The discussion highlights how aligning these functions can drive growth and improve customer satisfaction, all while ensuring a seamless, consistent experience across various channels.
Episode Highlights
- Combining Sales and Experience Roles (1:30)
- Team Structure and Leadership Alignment (3:25)
- Balancing Sales Growth with Customer Experience (5:55)
- Looking at NPS and Employee Satisfaction (7:14)
- Managing Disparate Data Sources (12:47)
- Connecting with Customers in a Large Organization (15:07)
- Cross-Department Collaboration and Omni-Channel Consistency (18:07)
- Connecting Experience to Sales (19:33)
- Challenges of Quantifying CX ROI (21:34)
- Looking Ahead: AI and ecommerce (22:50)
- Employee Experience and Final Thoughts (25:06)
Combining Sales and Experience Roles
Dom Nicastro: Hey, everybody. Dom Nicastro, editor-in-chief of CMSWire here with the latest edition of CMSWire TV's The Digital Experience. We're joined today by Phil Burrows, Senior Director, head of digital sales and E=experience for Verizon's mobility ecommerce channel. Phil, what's going on?
Phil Burrows: Good to be here.
Dom Nicastro: You had me at your hat.
Phil Burrows: Yeah, of course, I don't get a lot of that being down here in Jersey, so anytime I can get a nod to the Sox, it's always a good time.
Dom Nicastro: Celtics won the championship. Sox are up and coming. Patriots are steady. Bruins can't win the big one. So, you know, it's a so-so time in the Boston sports landscape.
Phil Burrows: That's right. Well, yeah, Panthers too. Florida did the job. Maybe we'll talk digital experience with those folks one of these days. But for now, we're getting into Verizon and what's going on in your world. Let's start with your title because we were talking about this a few weeks ago, and I was fascinated by the role that combines sales and experience. Usually, these are seen as separate, even conflicting areas, but you guys bring it all together.
Phil Burrows: Yeah, it's definitely interesting. At Verizon, many people wear different hats around the organization, which is great for employee growth overall. When it comes to sales and experience, we've been through different iterations—Is digital a channel? Is it experience? Is it a marketing vehicle? Where we landed is that it's all three.
We now sit within the Chief Customer Experience Organization, which has a dual purpose. We serve the business, our customers, and our employees. Our job is to drive growth, sales, and the adoption of digital tools for our customers while ensuring they have a frictionless experience, whether they stay in our channel or go to a retail location. Consistency in experience across all channels is crucial, even with the unique aspects of each channel. Has it been perfect all along? No, but like any organization, as you grow and go through growing pains, there's real value in being able to look at both sides of those lenses.
Team Structure and Leadership Alignment
Dom Nicastro: Let's break down your team even more. How many people are on it? Who's side by side with you in leadership, and who do you report up to? Organizational structure might not be the sexiest topic, but in this space, it's fascinating because it shows where the chief experience officer fits in, and how the roles of sales and experience merge together.
Phil Burrows: Yeah, it's interesting. And like I said, digital has taken on different flavors over the years as the business and consumers change, right? We evolve our operating models more macro as well.
So, in the current structure, I run our mobility sales and experience channel. Everything from what we do with our partners in the upper funnel media space to the site, the ordering experience, everything related to purchasing and signing up for service for our mobile phone products and plans.
I have a peer who runs the same for our home lines of business—our fixed wireless access, home internet, and FiOS products. That rolls up through an AVP, then through a digital VP, who is responsible for not only the sales and experience but also the onboarding of the customer, the lifecycle, and the post-sale management.
Think about the My Verizon app and all the things you do as a customer. One of our leaders recently said, "We're a life company," and I found that super interesting when you think about how long you've had a cell phone and the different life moments you experience with it. That digital VP reports to the chief customer experience officer, who reports directly to our CEO of consumer. Previously, CX didn't really have an equal seat at the table, but now we do among our chief revenue officer, consumer sales and service leaders, and retail leaders. This structure elevates the focus on customer experience at Verizon, as we recognize it as a huge driver and differentiator in the marketplace.
Related Article: What Do Customer Experience Teams Actually Look Like?
Balancing Sales Growth with Customer Experience
Dom Nicastro: It’s interesting, Phil. At the end of the day, experience often wins over the product itself. So, what are some of your big KPIs? What do you measure experience-wise, and what do you measure sales-wise?
Phil Burrows: For us, sales are about acquisition—new customers, existing customers adding services and lines. That's where our core KPIs lie. But from a customer experience perspective, we look at it through two lenses: indicators like interaction scores, site feedback, site health, and operations. We have a robust health and operations monitoring team looking at page performance, load time, and more. The things customers don’t notice until there’s a problem.
But where things blend together is in the overall marketing and sales efforts. Simplifying the customer experience, providing context, and removing friction helps our numbers across the board. It’s not just about promos and media, but about making the experience seamless, which in turn boosts conversion rates and close rates.
Looking at NPS and Employee Satisfaction
Dom Nicastro: A lot of customer experience leaders debate about metrics like NPS. Some use it, some don’t. Is there a North Star metric that you measure experience by, or is it a combination of KPIs?
Phil Burrows: I think it's a combination. We definitely look at NPS, but to your point, it's a bit of a lagging indicator. Sometimes you get it a couple of times a year, but we also look at other things, like digital interaction scores. Are people getting through the processes? Are they happy? Are they frustrated? Are we seeing friction? We have a bunch of tools that can look at this, so we can get a pulse check. We also look at employee satisfaction (CSAT) as another sub-indicator of NPS, asking, "Are we making these journeys or flows more frictionless than before?" There are metrics attached to that, so when NPS does come up, we should have a good sense.
Moving the NPS number is like moving a cruise ship—it’s a big number to shift, but we have aspirations there. You get there by identifying key areas. For us, on the CX side, even outside of digital, it's about identifying the five major areas we go after as a business that cover the majority of our transactions. We need to make sure we get those right from the start.
There's a lot of work going on around getting those major things right. Customer experience isn't just about removing steps and friction; it's about looking at policies, processes, and things that make sense to the customer. Ultimately, we're also focused on recognizing those moments, like at the dinner table, where people might complain—not just about us, but in general. How do we recognize you as a customer? We say, "Hey, you've been with us for 20 years. Thank you." It's those little things that build equity with our base and increase customer loyalty over time.
Dom Nicastro: I was going to say, I like how you're focusing on recognizing loyalty because we've all been on those customer contact center calls where they say, "Oh, Dom, thanks for being a customer for nine years," and I'm thinking, "Oh boy, here comes some kind of deal." But then they don't do anything with it—they just say, "Thank you for being a customer for nine years," and then hang up. I'm like, "What? I've been a loyal customer for nine years! What's going on? Give me something!"
But it doesn't happen. As you were talking, you mentioned a lot of metrics and things you look at beyond just NPS. So, all that data you're looking at—how do you get it together and make sense of it? Is there one tool that's a central source of data for you and your team, like a CDP, or is it kind of disparate, and you just have to manage it on your own?
Related Article: Teeing up Employee Experience to Enhance Customer Experience
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Managing Disparate Data Sources
Phil Burrows: It's a little bit of both, right? I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all tool. We try to keep things specific—like progression rates, flow rates. There are other things we partner on with teams like the health team to say, "Hey, are we seeing an outage somewhere? Is something off-trend?" There are pockets of data that we use and share across different organizations.
For example, our friends on the media side can give us insights into what's happening in the marketplace, which can help inform things we do down the funnel, and vice versa. There’s a lot of collaboration and sharing because there's so much data across the board where we are. And listen, it's always going to be a little disparate—everyone's got different pieces and angles—but I think the beauty of it is that everyone brings a unique piece to the table.
It's about prioritizing the main things you're going after. You can get lost in the data and overanalyze, so balancing expertise with customer knowledge and supporting data is key in a large organization like ours.
Dom Nicastro: I don't know what you're talking about, Phil, overanalyzing data. I don't refresh articles every half-day to see who's reading them. No, I don't do anything of the sort. But no, you're right. The phrase "paralysis by analysis" comes to mind. You can get into a bad groove where you're drowning in the data, and you forget to talk to customers and have focus groups with them. That's a good question too—how do you feel like you connect to customers? Because in such a big company with so many customers in the database, how do you make those intimate connections where you truly understand the customer’s needs?
Connecting with Customers in a Large Organization
Phil Burrows: There are a couple of different ways, right? We try to plan it out so it’s meaningful, and we take away the most from it. We have customer research teams that we work with on a day-to-day and month-to-month basis to get the right research around things we're pre-planning or new initiatives we’re going after. That's one way.
We also have day-to-day reporting that we look at—we’re all super well-versed in understanding what's going on with business fluctuations, trends, all that.
Then, there’s the other side—how do we stay close to the customer? Digital customers behave differently than someone who goes into a call center or a store. There are similarities, but there are also different purchasing behaviors and motivations between those sets of customers, and hybrids in between. But that doesn’t mean there’s no value. We spend a good amount of time, even though my team is in ecommerce and digital, going out to the stores and saying, "Hey, listen, here’s something we’re struggling with online. How are you thinking about it? What are customers saying when they come to you? How are you selling through it?"
We’ve had examples where field teams were doing a great job positioning a new promo, but the way they were positioning it was different from how we had merchandised it on the site. That was a learning we took back, and we said, "Alright, let’s test into that." We have testing teams doing experimentation, A/B testing, multivariate testing, and more.
Sometimes things work, and sometimes we find interesting learnings that we need to tweak online. I encourage the team—and myself—we all try to get out, listen to calls, go to the call center, and listen to retail employees because we’re all one big, happy family at the end of the day, even with different behaviors. There's a lot we can learn from each other, and we try to make that a regular part of what we do.
Dom Nicastro: What you said about going into the store is such a good point. You want to understand what's happening in that store because you can’t predict when someone will have an ecommerce problem and take it to the store to fix. They might say, "Hey, I couldn't do this or that on my phone," and you’ve got to have that unique customer profile. You have to know exactly where they’ve been. They don’t care that Phil Burrows doesn’t manage this part, that he’s the eCommerce mobility guy, and the in-store guy is different. That cross-department collaboration must be huge for you guys.
Cross-Department Collaboration and Omni-Channel Consistency
Phil Burrows: Huge, yeah, totally huge. After COVID, a lot of companies saw a huge surge toward digital. The expectation was that this would become the new norm, but we saw an even bigger shift back to omni-channel behavior. People are doing multiple transactions—researching online, going to the store, or vice versa.
The best we can do is be consistent from a CX perspective across all channels. How we approach our customers, the expectations we set, the value we provide—those need to be consistent, even if the channels look and feel different.
Connecting Experience to Sales
Dom Nicastro: Phil, with sales and experience under one roof, do you find yourself having to justify or figure out a formula to connect experience to sales? I think everyone has tried to find that formula, right? How do you actually drive that measurement? Is that something you think about a lot? Is it on your radar down the road? Some vendors are even trying to say they can justify experience into sales for you. Is that something top of mind for you?
Phil Burrows: I think that’s still a journey, and it’s really hard to stitch all that together. We’ve tried to do it in different pockets. For example, if a page takes more than three seconds to load, you’re going to lose 40% of people at that step because they’ll get frustrated and go somewhere else. You have to look at where they are in the buying journey. If a net new prospect is learning about us, and their first impression is that the site is slow, we know we’re going to lose them.
That’s an easy way to quantify it. We have teams laser-focused on this, ensuring the health and hygiene of the site are the best they can be because we know someone will just go shopping elsewhere. Those are areas where we can start to quantify the impact on abandonment, close rates, and fallout. We’re continuing to do that, looking at the journeys as well.
But I don’t think we’ve really landed on, “Hey, we did this one piece of copy, and it drove a more satisfied customer.” It’s tougher to do on the acquisition side, but we’re continuing to lean into it. If we see sales trending up and also see satisfaction in people progressing through the flows, we can start to make some correlations. We’ve been doing a bit of that as well.
Related Article: Guide for Perfect Sales and Marketing Alignment
Challenges of Quantifying CX ROI
Dom Nicastro: In a perfect world, you’d have customers’ cooperation through surveys to tell you why they made a purchase, right? I’m sure there are survey methods, asking how you feel at this moment, that kind of thing. But not everyone answers them, and not everyone tells you exactly what’s on their mind. I’d probably just hit 1, 1, 1, 1, 1 if I had to do a survey, you know?
Phil Burrows: Exactly, exactly. The biggest hurdle over the years has been quantifying the return on investment for customer experience. I think it’s more obvious than ever what that ROI is, even if it’s a bit fuzzy. We’ve made the internal investment there, which is great—our senior leadership has bought into that because we know it’s a differentiator.
It’s not just something nice to have; it’s the new standard of how you have to approach customers. We’re all consumers at the end of the day too, and that’s how we want to be approached. But it can also be an above-the-line differentiator for us to say, “By being a customer with us, these are all the benefits you get and how we take care of you.” That’s something we can go to market with.
Looking Ahead: AI and ecommerce
Dom Nicastro: Well, Phil, let’s wrap up by looking ahead. In the next 12 months, is there a big initiative you hope to accomplish by July of 2025? I have to ask this question because I haven’t yet in this interview, and I always do—are you looking into AI? Are you doing anything with AI yet? Is that part of an initiative for the future?
Phil Burrows: That’s great. I should have known that was coming. Yes, we’re doing a lot with AI, just like any other company. Right now, a lot of really good work is being done, especially in the field, with our employees to streamline processes. Think about it—when you’re helping a customer out, and you need to get a piece of information for them, instead of scrolling through to find that information and taking up time, we’re using generative technologies to bring up the answer immediately.
This reduces frustration for the customer and makes our front lines more effective. Our customer service reps do a great job, so we’re leaning into tools to help them serve the customer better. From an ecommerce perspective, we’re starting to ingest AI in the testing side of things. We’re big on not just putting something out there to put it out there.
We want it to be meaningful, to test it with customers, test different variations, and ultimately scale it. We’re looking at areas where, for example, if we don’t have something in stock, how can we recommend something based on what we know about you that you’re likely to want? We’re testing AI in specific use cases, not just for the sake of using AI.
There are very meaningful use cases we’re testing and scaling into our systems. That’s what I’m excited about. If you think about the journey we’re going on from an eCommerce perspective, we’re continuing to simplify and contextualize for the customer, especially for those bringing multiple people over to us.
How do we make that super easy so they’re comfortable, know what they’re getting into, and have a great experience from the start? That’s where some of this AI and machine learning will help us with that feedback loop and rapid iteration of new experiences.
Employee Experience and Final Thoughts
Dom Nicastro: 100%. I think we’re seeing the same thing. It’s been more of an employee experience win, like you mentioned, empowering those contact center agents to have quick answers. If they’re better, and the customer likes them better, that’s a better employee experience, right?
Phil Burrows: Absolutely. The goal of the show is to see what’s going on behind the curtain and how the magic is made. It was great to connect and get into the world of sales and experience. Somehow, you guys pull it off, bringing together different parts of the world in a business under one roof and having success. We appreciate you coming on the show.
Dom Nicastro: Absolutely. Phil Burrows of Verizon, thanks for joining us on CMSWire TV’s The Digital Experience. Talk to you soon, buddy.
Phil Burrows: Thank you so much. It’s been fun.
