Verizon Is Crossing The Bar To Retain Customers

Verizon spying on customers for its own incentives

Verizon Communications Inc. is a reliable name in the world of pay TV, wireless communication along with an internet service provider. The company is now trying its best to retain customers thus for the same reason the company is keeping a track of its customers, what devices they possess, what do they actually watch, the data they consume along with every other detail they can access reports Quartz.

Apart from this, the company is also reportedly observing phone calls of their customers in real time. For instance, in case any trigger word is spoken by the consumer then supervisors barge in to keep track. This for most is a violation of privacy but according to a Verizon Executive, Mr. Mahmoud El Assir told the Data Driven NYC Conference attendees that they have a number of data professionals that go beyond leaps and bounds in order to help them retain customers.

He explains that Verizon Communication “monitors billions of data points a day from 7 million Verizon FiOS customers.” This according to the company helps the customer service representatives to gather as much as information possible about the user who asks for the cancellation of their service.

According to Mr. Assir, “Now when an agent gets a call, instead of blindly resizing customers’ cable packages, agents can tell them how they might lose these two channels and how often they watch them.” He further added, “It’s a more educated conversation with the customer.”

For the same reason Verizon is also looking for customer representatives that can further streamline the mechanism and assist them in making it more user needs targeted.

Apart from this the company has an extensive mechanism that ensures data mining that allow them to sell services to new subscribers. The company has an efficient mechanism which to some extent shows their eagerness to retain customers. This practice could have been acceptable if it had been done in aggregate manner but VZ at times crosses the threshold.

The problem with such a mechanism is simple. Everything a consumer does be it private or public is constantly under scrutiny so that they do not lose a customer. But using such a mechanism gives birth to privacy concerns and a sense of insecurity in consumers who might at times won’t even have an idea that they are being monitored.

Ironically, Verizon does not even realize that what it is doing is actually a privacy violation. This makes them more resilient and more satisfied will the ill practice they are supporting.