What are your plans for continuing to support a breadth of talent at Verizon Partner Solutions [VPS]?
Verizon leads the market in the US partly because we continue to attract and develop top talent, creating a culture in which every employee can do their best work.
Our goal of fostering a caring and inclusive culture is aimed at having a meaningful societal impact too. This is important not only within our team, but also to ensure a really engaged workforce that provides the best possible experiences for our customers.
Can you describe a bit about your background at VPS and how it informs your current role?
I’ve had the good fortune to work with many amazing teams and leaders throughout my career. Much of my journey has been about working on initiatives to support the customer experience, and I have always found that clear, consistent communication is crucial.
At present, I lead the strategic sales enablement team at VPS, taking responsibility for the execution of key programmes and engaging with cross-functional teams to deliver on goals.
Recently, my role expanded to include overseeing the development and coordination of sales commission plans for wholesale services. This includes setting sales targets and quotas, maintaining customer lists and dealing with commission payments, while my team handles marketing communications, events and social media activities too.
My days are filled with high-energy engagements across a myriad of teams, all of which strive towards the common goal of creating the optimum experience for our customers. I have the privilege of leading a best-in-class team of professionals from around the globe who inspire me on a daily basis.
What are the key trends you see in today’s wholesale industry?
The industry is undergoing a period of significant transformation driven by evolving customer behaviour, technological advances and economic shifts. Automation is central to this change, with wholesalers also increasingly leveraging data analytics to gain insights into customer behaviour and optimise pricing.
One clear trend is the acceleration of generative AI, which is causing bandwidth demand to soar across the globe. Industry figures suggest that 60 to 70% of AI workloads will move to real-time inference by 2030, requiring low-latency connectivity, compute and security at the edge.
In the midst of these trends, Verizon is making significant investments in edge computing, network automation and AI-centric security services.
How do current industry trends inform your role at VPS and your vision of the company’s future?
My role involves helping to shape VPS’s future by focusing on innovative learning strategies, building partnerships and ensuring effective strategy execution, all while adapting to market demands.
We continually ask for customer feedback, hold periodic Customer Advisory Board meetings, and also host our annual Partner Summit. These activities all provide a great opportunity to hear from customers and thus ensure that we empower our partnerships through alignment on future requirements.
My team then takes these insights and works with our marketing, product, network, finance, legal and sales departments, as well as IT partners, to prioritise and develop initiatives and action plans.
In which other ways do you track customer needs and assess ongoing performance?
It’s important that we regularly track key performance indicators to measure the effectiveness of strategies and identify areas for improvement. This fosters a culture of continuous learning, while encouraging employees to experiment and share their ideas.
Furthermore, it’s crucial that we select the appropriate ‘voice-of-customer’ tools and methods like surveys, interviews, social media monitoring, feedback forms and net promoter scores. Once we collect this information, we organise and store it in a central repository to help guide future strategies. Collecting appropriate feedback is also key to carrying out targeted and personalised programmes and campaigns.
We make sure that we put the customer at the centre of everything we do, from the Partner Summits and Customer Advisory Boards I already mentioned to innovation showcases that give them a voice on future developments.
What would you say it takes to be a leader in today’s global wholesale telecoms market?
In my experience, being a leader in the industry means prioritising customer and employee experience, embracing digital transformation and building strong ecosystems of services and partners, while adapting to evolving market structures and technological advances. Automation needs to be at the centre of almost all business activities, enabling a flexible, agile and resilient organisation that’s able to properly personalise services for customers.
On top of this, the need for fast adaptation and innovation in a more digital and software-centric world requires leaders to provide relevant training, with upskilling and reskilling to meet changing customer demands.
Meanwhile, it’s increasingly important to prioritise network resilience, service reliability and security. Being able to offer customers a high level of trust also acts as a key differentiator in a competitive communications environment, with Verizon ready and able to build diverse options with protection to meet specific requirements.
What initiatives are you currently carrying out, and how do you see the long-term future for VPS?
My team leads transformation efforts at VPS, working across teams to build business cases and document requirements for building self-service capabilities, as well as transforming processes for engaging with customers.
We’re also closely involved in efforts to deliver world-class high-bandwidth capabilities such as 400G wave in the US, helping to support high-capacity connectivity and ultra-low latency. At the same time, we offer flexible options, providing scalable services at 1G, 10G and 100G levels.
In the long term, advances in the wholesale arena hinge on embracing technology, prioritising the customer experience and adapting to changing market dynamics. Strong customer relationships and delivering on user needs will continue to drive results and success as we continue to undergo the digital transformation in the coming years.
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