Improving the customer experience, digital transformation, security and mobility

Verizon is making investments in the following areas. How do you rank these in order of importance to your finance and insurance business?

IoT facilitation and infrastructure

Virtual Network Services

Contact Center Services

Cloud-based PBX solutions

1

2

3

4

Notes from the 2017 finance and insurance customer advisory board

2017 finance and insurance customer advisory board

Executive summaryThe 2017 finance and insurance customer advisory board was held on May 10–11, 2017 in New York City, with 26 customers representing 24 companies in attendance. The overall theme for the discussion revolved around identifying strategies to improve the customer experience, digital transformation, the evolving threat landscape and mobile everything.

George Fischer, SVP & Group President, Verizon Enterprise Solution, welcomed CAB members and provided them with a high level overview of the Verizon, financials, acquisitions and strategy. George shared Verizon’s mission: We empower our customers and partners to thrive by delivering the connected world; simply, securely and reliably. He also shared the enterprise solutions growth catalysts: Network Virtualization Evolution, Advanced Communications, and Managed Services.

Topics with the largest customer mindshare:

• Automation bots

• Evolution of 5G

• Data analytics

• Cybersecurity

• SD-WAN

• Going agile

• Artificial intelligence

Agenda

Day 1

• Welcome and member expectations

• Enterprise innovation investment and product development

• Path to 5G

• Innovation showcase and reception

• Dinner with guest speaker, Dr. Arthur Langer

Day 2

• Fireside chat: CMO and CIO partnership

• Solution breakout groups: Virtual Network Services (VNS) and security, mobility and customer experience

• Verizon Wireless use case: Digital Transformation

• Peer group breakout session and readout

• Boundless 5G

• SD-WAN

• Going agile

• Closing comments and next steps

2017 finance and insurance customer advisory board

What our members wanted to learn aboutSpecific business challenges

• Creating an omnichannel experience for customers and doing it quickly enough to keep up with innovation

• Accelerating the pace of adoption

• Retaining talent and driving change across the company

• Automation

• Network reliability and performance

Expectations for the event

We then asked the attendees what they wanted to get out of the event. They said:

Learn more about Verizon’s product roadmap, and discuss whether it aligns with our roadmap.

Learn more about other companies’ challenges.

Share best practices.

Gain a better understanding of Verizon’s strategy.

Learn how to manage security as we deliver products and services to market.

Enterprise product

Mike Lanman, Senior Vice President, Business Products and IoT, Verizon

Mike spoke about Verizon’s infrastructure investments in high-demand and high-growth areas such as One Fiber and 5G, focusing on how Business Products is extending capabilities and building on next-gen platforms.

Table discussion

How are you innovating to keep pace with customer expectations?

There are common issues in terms of customer experience in the branch.

Attendee: How can you make the customer experience more digitally rich?

Attendee: How do you adapt your solutions to different generations, and help them use their devices?

Attendee: How do you make network transformation in the branches fundamental to customer experience?

Attendee: How do we leverage analytics?

Attendee: What is the impact of Google Home/Alexa on the market?

Vic Bhagat, SVP and CIO, Verizon: In the financial world, IT is about engineering anything that touches the customers. You must leverage IT to make this happen. The mobile world is changing the way we deliver instant gratification. How do we meet the high expectations of our consumers? They want a high level of service. They like what we are doing in the application space, such as self-adjusting applications. Can we apply the same thing in the agile infrastructure? What can we learn from our partners? We can’t run on yesterday’s technology. But can our infrastructure meet the new demands? The IT proven framework we are running on—are we bringing that to market, and allowing our customers to deliver that to their customers? We need to align ourselves and help them deliver a world class experience faster.

Based on what you have seen thus far, rate on a scale from 1 to 10 how well aligned our investments are with your needs.

5 (somewhat aligned)

6

7

8

9: 0%

10 (completely aligned): 0%

16%

16%

37%

32%

2017 finance and insurance customer advisory board

The path to 5GJustin Blair, Director, Technology, Verizon; Rasika Abeysinghe, Director, 5G Leadership, Nokia

Justin spoke about creating the future—5G and the benefits of fiber to wireless, leveraging 4G evolution building blocks, new technology advancements, and the on-going field trials.

Rasika noted that 5G has the potential to solve your key business challenges—bandwidth, reliability, security. It is going to be the ultimate manager of all the various devices, connecting the right keys to the right device. 5G will allow you to support multi-connectivity, which allows you to combine multiple types of devices together. His closing comments were about ultra-reliability, low latency, location awareness, data security, and massive machine-type communication. These were the key takeaways from 5G use cases, and important aspects of the technology.

At the end of the session, Verizon made it known that we are looking for early adopters to work with.

Customers noted the top three features of 5G they would like to see are (34 responses):

Better Quality of Service (guaranteed level of service)

Higher throughput (Gbps)

Lower network delay (sub-ms latency)

15

8

5

2017 finance and insurance customer advisory board

Marketing and IT, enabling digital transformationVic Bhagat, SVP and CIO, Verizon; Tony Recine, SVP and CMO, Verizon

Vic and Tony spoke about the three major areas that they work together on.

Customer experience

Better customer experience starts with better digital interactions.• Organizational alignment and collaboration• Outside-in approach

Product development

Going agile.• Going from idea to stocked shelf quickly• Offer the right product at the right time• Change strategy as fast as customers

change their minds

IT proven

Our proven framework and why we are doing it right.• Overview of framework and projects• Verizon retail store use case• Lessons learned

Attendee: There are fiefdoms, but there are elements of the technology that can support everyone. The power of digitization, bots, artificial intelligence—this is what businesses are embracing, and the real-time feedback we get.

Attendee: Customer journey mapping is becoming much more bi-directional. This is an opportunity to build consistent solutions for customer delivery.

Vic: We had to shift our organizational focus to create a win-win situation. The main challenges included having the courage to address the day in and day out bureaucracy, and learning that our previous methods no longer work. One customer was telling me how complex the billing systems were—we were making it complex for the customer. IT is getting more involved in implementing our solutions—so the learnings we go through can simplify the way our customers implement these solutions. IT proven means using our own learnings to make it easier to do business with us. How can we become more responsive? If I can cut down that cycle time and improve security and reliability, why wouldn’t you want to do business with us?

Attendee: It’s past the point where we have a seat at the table. The business is based on the technology.

Attendee: SD-WAN is a game changer if VZ markets that right. Primary network doesn’t have to be the primary network if I don’t want it to be.

Attendee: What are you doing about application visibility? Starting with telling businesses what apps are going down when.

Mike Bickel, SVP Customer Success, Verizon: We talked a lot about outages, spending more time on performance and not just availability, looking at applications and what medium they’re running across, when we have interruptions and use SD-WAN to move. In terms of apps—they moved to broadband as an example. We can see performance comparisons and know what works well, and what doesn’t, and share that with customers.

2017 finance and insurance customer advisory board

Solutions breakout groups:

Mobility and digital customer experience, discussion and roadmapCustomers were asked to collaborate with their peers regarding the importance of digital customer experience and mobility.

Justin Blair, Director, Technology, Verizon; Gordon Littley, Managing Director, Advanced Communications, Verizon

Mobility

Opening discussion on what mobility means to the customers, and some of the challenges being faced today.

Attendee: How to extract IoT data from devices in a secure way, and analytics.

Attendee: Delivering a consistent customer experience.

Attendee: Need better solutions that are going to work across platforms.

Attendee: Industry needs to come together around standards for IoT. Things should be plug-and-play in terms of the APIs Verizon is offering.

Attendee: Defining the relationship between experience and digitization. Could your phone be your IoT device without losing the personal relationship?

Attendee: If you have a use case with a lot of devices, you need low cost. Need use cases for finance IoT and maybe a follow-up webinar. Interested in small cells—we want carrier agnostic products for small locations, and speed of implementation for larger locations.

Customer experience

Gordon Littley, Managing Director Advanced Communications, Verizon Enterprise Solutions

Table discussion notes

What new initiatives do you have underway to deliver a seamless cross-channel experience?

Gordon: Banks are starting to move towards click-to-connect. Go straight from a mobile app to an agent.

Attendee: Make sure you identify and fix the processes you want to automate, before you automate.

Attendee: The mobile banking app is intuitive, it lets customers do what they want. QA testing includes end user acceptance.

Attendee: We created a new omnichannel team in the retail business, and hope to leverage it for the commercial side.

Attendee: There is a bigger focus on contact and call centers. People expect to talk to people, not an AI agent.

Attendee: Parity across mobile applications. We built an application—a chat or call contact center.

Table discussion notes (part 2)

How are you measuring and improving customer experiences?

Attendee: A professionally conducted, on-going survey process.

Attendee: Leveraging analytics from mobile and IoT.

Attendee: Using mobility and wearables to automate authentication and access.

Attendee: Bring Your Own Device (BYOD). Having the same experience regardless of device (personal or corporate).

Attendee: Speed of provisioning upgrades, and refreshing new devices proactively.

Attendee: Voice recognition.

14%

58%

14%

of our customers said 25%.

of our customers said 50%.

of our customers said 75%.

14% of our customers said greater than 75%.

How much of IT’s priorities are being set or influenced by customer experience initiatives?

2017 finance and insurance customer advisory board

Solutions breakout groups:

Virtual Network Services and security roadmap discussionCustomers were challenged to discuss their roadmap plans on incorporating both VNS and security.

Vickie Lonker, Executive Director Product Management/Development, Verizon Global Product and Services; Bryan Sartin, Executive Director Professional Services, Verizon Enterprise Solutions

Virtual Network Services (VNS)

Attendee: The extended enterprise—can you achieve network segmentation?

Vickie: Yes, we have customers that use extended enterprise to achieve network segmentation. Network COD is perfect use case for SD-WAN. Universal CPE feedback—have switch ports.

Attendee: Where does the server sit? Verizon?

Vickie: Your premise or ours. With the hosted cloud, the server should be in another premise — Verizon manages it on your behalf. The Verizon added value is the management of this application.

Attendee: Can I run edge devices in the cloud?

Vickie: Lots of firewall apps are in the cloud, virtual CPE for instance can be in the cloud.

Attendee: There is a very real culture shift at different stages in the company. We talk about agile, but how we implement it across silos is key, the bank doesn’t win until the whole system is complete.

Which best describes your current strategy regarding purchasing security-as-a-service capabilities?

We are or intend to procure services for managed firewall

We are or intend to procure the services above plus IDS and IPS

We are or intend to procure the services above plus UTM capabilities

We are currently evaluating some or all of the above

We don’t currently have any plans to procure security-as-a-service capabilities

0%

22%

22%

11%

44%

Security roadmap

Attendee: What will happen the next time there’s a big breach? The government is doing more but still not enough. There is value in Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center (FS-ISAC) information sharing.

Attendee: The predictive side is interesting because it’s so live. We are interested in cyber insurance underwriting.

Attendee: What is our biggest risk right now? Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks?

Bryan: Activism, tax on critical infrastructure.

Attendee: What we are doing in our Security Operations Center (SOC) is not at all like what we are doing in our Network Operations Center (NOC). Resolving DDoS doesn’t involve security teams.

Attendee: We have a NOC, SOC, and cybersecurity.

Bryan: Marry Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) context with wireless analytics, and NetFlow allows us to do this.

Attendee: Are you doing anything to scale DDoS attacks?

Bryan: Yes, you’re going to see releases later this year; some of these things can be fundamental parts of all your circuits.

Which of the following are your greatest IT security challenges? Choose three:

Managing enterprise mobility

Changing regulatory landscape

Hiring and retaining talent

Evolving cybercrime threats

Disruptive business models

Supply chain management

Cloud and extended enterprise

5%

23%

14%

32%

10%

10%

6%

2017 finance and insurance customer advisory board

Verizon Wireless digital transformationMark Studness, VP Wireless Digital Operations, Verizon

We have 1,700 corporate stores, and we are really fortunate to have profitable stores. The digital experience can look very different. We have come full circle—as we talked to customers we realized we had too much of a siloed strategy, in both operations and mentality. What is commerce? It’s not just a store or online—it’s both—so we had to connect those journeys. My mission in digital is to enable sales for the whole company, not just online sales. It needs to be a seamless transition from online to the store.

Please pick your top two priorities for enterprise mobile investment:

Enterprise app migration to mobile

12%

Mobile productivity apps

24%

One number, multiple devices

2%

Collaboration

17%

Mobile security

31%

In building coverage improvements

14%

2017 finance and insurance customer advisory board

Innovation showcaseAs part of our innovation showcase, the following solutions and experiences were demonstrated and discussed.

One Talk andBusiness Continuity:Enterprise mobility services that power the digital workforce

Visual Interactive Calling and Virtual Contact Center:Build customer loyalty with seamless customer care

Verizon Enterprise Center:Re-imagining the digital customer experience

5G

Verizon Enterprise

Center

OneTalk and Business

Continuity

5G

VIC/VCC

Which of the following solutions would you like to learn more about in our next meeting?

Closing comments and next steps

Scott Eason, Group Vice President, Financial Services Sector, Verizon, and Ashley Stanton, Director, Mobile Solution Sales for Verizon, brought the day to a close with the following comments.

Future discussion topics and events:

• Gartner Symposium/ITxpo | October, 15 | Orlando, FL

• New business models from IoT

• Enterprise One Talk trial

• Predictive cyber threat capabilities

• IT use case webinar with Vic Bhagat (scheduled for fall 2017)

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