Verizon Business Group - Best Telecommunications Website

Company: Verizon Business Group, Basking Ridge, NJ
Company Description: Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE, Nasdaq: VZ) was formed on June 30, 2000 and is celebrating its 20th year as one of the world’s leading providers of technology, communications, information and entertainment products and services. The company offers voice, data and video services and solutions on its award winning networks and platforms.
Nomination Category: Web Achievement Categories - Industry
Nomination Sub Category: Telecommunications

Nomination Title: Streamlining The Mobile Device Protection Insurance Online Sales Experience

Our ever-changing business world demands “always-on” capabilities, keeping us close to and in contact with our customers to best serve them. Verizon Business Group (VBG) provides a wide variety of dynamic services and devices that power business today and enable the level of contact in demand.

The pandemic has altered our ability to have face-to-face interactions, placing even greater demands on the technology we use to stay in touch, albeit virtually, via smarter, more powerful devices and unlimited plans. Businesses therefore have responded by upgrading to the latest smartphone devices for their virtual teams to close the connection gap with customers. These devices have greater capabilities but come at increased costs, therefore this creates a risk to the business should a smart device be lost, stolen or broken.

The VBG Digital team quickly assembled a “Collapsed Agile Team” comprised of experts from digital, Total Mobile Protection product team, experience design, cross-channel analytics and collectively dug through the Voice of Customer feedback from the TMP page / Chat Transcripts, interviewed sales agents great at meeting customer needs with TMP and sales attach rates, benchmarked best in class experiences and reviewed the metrics at every step of the TMP learn / buy journey.

Just before the pandemic altered our normal in 2020, the Digital team at VBG re-imagined the online sales journey for buying Mobile Device Protection Insurance, as elemental to the device purchase process and included it as an integral part of the device purchase flow. As the pandemic hit and companies scrambled to get their remote teams technology they needed to operate in a different world, the revised and streamlined TMP buy journey was launched.

The revised TMP buy flow eliminated six steps in the customer journey from email to cart checkout in the My Business portal by deep-linking the customer directly to the TMP selection page. This reduced the friction of searching for or completing extra navigational steps to discover and add the product.

Both the Customer and the Business benefited as Customers could quickly locate and complete their evaluation task if TMP was right for them. VBG realized increased device protection digital attach rate while simultaneously reducing the need for customers to visit stores or call agents as both had become scarce during the pandemic forcing the lockdown of physical stores / channels.

This customer-first approach allowed the business to uncover a framework of capabilities that were able to be replicated in other customer engagements on the site.

The digital channel experienced a 216% increase on product attach rate year-over-year and reduced customer effort to three steps from nine steps.

The old adage of “less is more” could not have been more true by weaving the pertinence of value-added add-on’s at the correct point in the buying journey. Even though this improvement inadvertently coincided at the start of the pandemic when customers may have been looking for ways to protect their device investments, VBG began to incorporate a Customer’s mental model of purchasing into the buy journey that has uncovered other areas of opportunity to improve the Call-To-Action (CTA) placements on external VZ pages to My Business to drive further digital engagement.