Summary
In this session, you will learn about Verizon’s model for transforming and scaling our CX operations and design practices, and how establishing a set of Experience Principles has played a critical role in elevating and democratizing CX across the organization.
Key Insights
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Organizational structure heavily influences design impact; Verizon’s design group sits under marketing, making marketing leaders key decision-makers for design.
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Design maturity ranges from evangelism to operationalization, with Verizon currently between influence and capacity phases.
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Experience principles help articulate not just what experiences look like but how they behave and the customer outcomes they drive.
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Verizon’s experience principles focus on three categories: meaningful (useful, simple, reliable), human (personal, caring, supportive), and responsible (honest, ethical, sustainable).
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Crafting principles in accessible language aligned with company jargon boosts adoption beyond design teams to broad organizational audiences.
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Unexpected leadership support, especially from Verizon’s CMO, helped elevate experience principles into the brand strategy, amplifying visibility and buy-in.
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Balancing principle conciseness with meaningfulness is critical; one-word adjectives aided memorability and alignment across broad audiences.
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Experience principles serve as a foundation for creating measurable experience KPIs to quantify design impact alongside business metrics.
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Continuous iteration and feedback loops with internal teams and customers are essential for evolving principles as company priorities change.
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Democratizing design decision-making by embedding experience principles across teams supports a customer-centric culture beyond the design group.
Notable Quotes
"Customer experience refers to the holistic picture of the customer relationship, not just interaction with a single digital channel."
"Our design group is positioned under marketing, so marketing leaders become key advocates and decision-makers for design in our org."
"Design maturity dictates how much influence design has outside the design group, impacting policy, finance, and other teams' decisions."
"We didn’t have a clear definition of what Verizon customer experiences were or how they behaved, which led us to create experience principles."
"Language, language, language—using familiar company terms helped teams feel comfortable adopting and practicing the experience principles."
"Our CMO was developing a brand strategy at the same time and organically integrated our experience principles into it, which was huge for us."
"Creating a set of experience KPIs allows us to measure whether our experiences are simple, honest, and meeting customer expectations."
"We want these principles to be broad and channel-agnostic so they can be applied across all teams, not just designers."
"It’s not enough to just write down principles—they must be operationalized and made actionable for different teams."
"This is not a one-time project; adoption and mature use of principles take time and continuous refinement."
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