Verizon Connect is a Global Enterprise SaaS (Software as a Service) business offering a total fleet management platform. The products and services enable small to enterprise customers to run safer, more efficient and compliant fleets. Verizon Connect is a part of Verizon Business Group within Verizon, the American mobile network. Currently I am the CX and Service Design manager. My role has grown over the past 4+ years from a UX designer, to lead service designer to manager. I have grown the service design and CX discipline and capabilities within the business. 

Growing a Customer Experience (CX) and Service Design Discipline

In 2016 Verizon bought and merged several vehicle-tracking (or telematics) businesses and created “Verizon Connect”. I joined in 2018 in the Christchurch office, which was formerly Telogis, and focused on enterprise customers. There was a small UX team in New Zealand with product management based in the US. I got stuck-in to projects and could see an opportunity to introduce journey mapping, to help better-align the many teams involved, in large programs. 

Journey mapping soon became wanted and valued within the product and R&D teams and we found ourselves with 100s of maps! I introduced and partnered with other design leaders over two interventions to help with this situation; 

1. Journey framework 

2. Global House Tours 

1. Verizon Connect Journey Framework: Try, Buy, Getting Started, Use, Support and Renew 

This journey framework gave teams a way to compare journeys for different products, channels and segments and meant I could start working towards a “master map” - one giant service blueprint showing the whole end to end customer journey, highlighting the key changes/initiatives in progress and the behind the scenes (backstage) teams, systems and processes. 

2. Global House tours 

Our global design team, of over 60 people, is spread out over 4 countries - making it incredibly hard to keep each other updated and in sync - and we could see a lot of duplication of work going on.. As a part of a project handover, I visited the Dublin office, and initiated the Global house tours with a colleague.

Each of the design teams already had “walk the walls” where they would share research, concept and design work that was underway. The idea behind the house tour was for each country to put up their ‘walls’ in a room and give each other a tour around our work.

We met monthly for almost 2 years building empathy between the teams in different countries and between the different disciplines. Design discipline guilds also grew over this time as a result, I think, of people becoming more aware of them. This led to more people being able to put faces to names.  The house tours made the teams more efficient, by reducing duplication of work - as work became more visible.  Also,  more designers/researchers could sync up and share and build upon each others’ work instead of working in silos/bubbles. It also contributed to design-capability maturity; for, by seeing the different levels of work quality across the team - naturally the quality of work increased - as designers and researchers could see what was "good" vs what is "great".  

The Master map 

As the business merging progressed we soon felt a lot of ‘customer churn’ which naturally comes with so much change. The ‘master map’ was able to show the business the whole end to end customer journey - and to highlight the gaps and pain points in the journey - where we weren’t providing a good experience and were contributing to customer churn. “War rooms” were stood up, to focus on our churn challenge, and the master map soon became a way forward to identify key programs and processes which needed to be introduced, improved or removed. A customer transformation program was initiated.. 

In addition, during 2020 I kicked off the “Mappers Club” to connect with the other people in the business who were making maps - process improvement staff, product owners, business analytics and marketing etc. The club met monthly and shared work, tips, techniques, methods and business knowledge with each other. This community fostered a customer-centric, collaborative way of working that has flowed out into the wider business. 

CX Strategy & Vision

After completing the ‘current state’ experience, the business needed a ‘future state’ experience to align upon and work towards. By this time I had grown a Global team of CX and Service designers. 

This was one of the first projects my new team led, a Small Medium Business (SMB) 2 year future state (to-be) experience design. We ran many workshops with over 100 stakeholders from all over the business, leveraged all our customer research and co-designed an experience to align and work towards what would “Woo, Wow and Win” our customers. “Woo Wow and Win” became the tagline of the customer transformation program (inspired by the book). 

Deriving from and building on this work we created current and future-state ecosystem maps, to highlight the key things that needed to be designed, for this new vision. The merger process had resulted in 100s of systems and we needed these to be consolidated into one unified ecosystem to make our customers’, and employees’, experience a lot less complicated.

I guided the team to interview architects and system administrators all over the business to put together the current-state ecosystem map.  And, then, guided the team to turn the future-state service-blueprint map into tasks and content for a future-state ecosystem. We identified 5 key areas for the business to work towards and worked with our Business Insights (data analysts) team to estimate the impact the future state unified ecosystem could have on the business; we estimated a +38% increase in customer self-service (helping reduce support calls), and a +14% increase in customer retention within 1 year from programme start.

This program has been underway for SMB for over a year now and my team are leading many of the key projects to work towards this design vision. At the end of 2022 the business reported a reduction in disconnects/churn of -31% for our SMB customers.  

Journey Management

During 2021 I introduced the concept of ‘Journey Management to the business. This involved pitching a new capability-role which could help make decisions and align the many programs, projects and enhancements going on across the business, outside the sphere of product organisation.

The business is now tagging all projects to a customer journey stage and the program architecture and operations teams are, since the end of 2022, structured around the customer journey.

CX design leadership - leading with culture first

When given the remit to form a CX & Service Design team at the end of 2021 the main thing I looked for, when hiring team members, was an empathetic attitude towards stakeholders and partners.

Then, as the team formed, I encouraged them to focus on 2 key things;

1. Listening; deep listening to each other, their stakeholders and leaders helped the team partner and show up around the business in a mature, meaningful way.

2. Working-out-loud. The team were encouraged to seek feedback on their work early and often. (I think they have come to love this - as they constantly pull each other into workshops and working sessions to help each other out on all their projects - it's a joy to see!)

I like to lead through connecting up people - and to help the team members foster strong working relationships and build their own networks, within the business. I set up several fortnightly (every 2 weeks) syncs with several of the key teams with which we work predominantly.   In these sessions we share work, invite leaders and guests, from around the business, for panel-type discussions and foster a culture of natural collaboration and sharing. 

I facilitated my team to co-design our processes and ways of working when we met in person in Atlanta in early 2022. 

Awards + Thought leadership 

• All In Award - 2021 - Verizon award - recognition for delivering results for our customers and company while encompassing the Verizon culture pillars. 

• WoW - Women of the World program - 2021-2022 - application awarded to the leadership development program - virtual workshops and mentoring from Verizon leaders.  

• Verizon Business APAC CX maturity model - spoke on several panels and a podcast about CX maturity.

Volunteering

Verizon has a fantastic volunteering program. I have been a Corporate Social Responsibility rep for 3 years now. Some of my satisfying achievements have come from this work. 

• Laptop donations program - donated 70+ laptops to Recycle a Device and set up a process for laptops to be donated to charity instead of going into landfill. 

• Code Club - participated in Hoon Hay primary school code club - teaching 3d modelling to the kids too! 

• Helptank - leading research and design for the redesign of the volunteer and charity matching website helptank.co.nz