How Verizon Partner Solutions is Transforming the Customer Experience

Scott Melanson, Verizon Partner Solutions

In late 2018, I laid out a roadmap for how Verizon Partner Solutions plans to transform the customer experience (CX), including a consolidation, overhaul and redesign of our existing customer portals into a single, highly capable and easy-to-use portal.

Since that time, my team and I have been working hard to improve our CX to best serve our customers and cement Verizon Partner Solutions as the world’s top wholesale provider in the communications industry. Using a design-thinking approach focused on our customer and utilizing the feedback they have given us has been a truly exciting process; one that has completely changed how we think about implementing our technology.

With so much happening in just a few months, I wanted to give you an update on our progress so far.

A Roadmap to Success

Over the past two years, the CX team has spent a good deal of time understanding the needs of our customers and mapping out their journey; from discovery and learning, to onboarding and ordering, to fulfillment and assurance. Once the journey was mapped, we dedicated a substantial amount of investment and focus in building out our customer portal and APIs.

In Q4 of 2018, we launched a beta version of the new Verizon Partner Solutions customer portal to several users of a strategically chosen product. In the beta portal, customers are able to make use of its robust capabilities, including processing production orders through the system.

So far, my team has received great feedback from beta users, who say our new and improved portal makes it much easier for them to do business with us.

New Verizon Partner Solutions Customer Portal

Now that we’ve tested the customer portal, work through any inefficiencies and add significant enhancements, we’re proud to launch the new technology to all Verizon Partner Solutions customers starting late Q2 2019.

Once the new customer portal is released to customers, my team’s work is still long from done. Through to 2020 and beyond, we’ll be enhancing the platform to provide richness and additional capabilities through a systemized approach.

This rollout includes:

Shop

Our first priority for the portal has been to build a strong infrastructure for shopping, since it’s the crux of what our customers do each day. This includes allowing customers to view products, receive and accept a quote, make an order and get it fulfilled, all through the platform.

Learn

With the new platform, returning and first-time customers will be able to learn about our VPS products sets, operations and more through an improved, informative and digitized education center. Through being able to solve challenges and answer questions with things like video, our customers will be able to better help themselves.

Setup

Our new portal introduces a clean and consistent way for new VPS customers to set up an account when they want to purchase a new product or become a first-time customer.

Assurance

Assurance includes post-fulfillment service such as billing and repair. On the billing end, our portal will allow customers to view their bill online, receive details, download it and, if they have questions, easily submit a request for support.

On the repair side, the new VPS portal lets customers easily create a ticket, and receive live updates on resolution progress. For support matters, we’re moving towards the direction of click-to-chat functionality, to help customers solve problems more efficiently and in real-time.

New Verizon Partner Solutions API

While our customer portal is being developed and enhanced from a self-service perspective, we’re continuing to build out our APIs to allow customers who transact through those channels to enjoy the same capabilities. This is a significant benefit for our wholesale customers selling to their end users, as it allows wholesale customers to provide a more seamless experience through their brand by connecting to our API.

Not only is VPs offering this technology directly to our customers, but we’re also working with TM Forum organizations to provide standardization across industry enablers. This ensures that customers who use enablers can use the full extent of our API as new enhancements are made.

I’m proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish in a short period of time, and look forward to continued transformation of our customer experience to better enable our customers .

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