Amid Unprecedented Times, Keeping Customers at the Center

The coronavirus (COVID-19) is forcing countless changes in everyday life. More workers doing their jobs from home. More students taking online courses. More people relying on social media and texts to connect with family and friends. In a time of social distancing and great uncertainty, connectivity has never been more important.

As these familiar examples suggest, customers are relying on their digital communications more than ever. For us at Verizon, that means keeping our focus on the 130 million Americans who are depending on our network right now.

This focus has motivated us to do all we can to ensure reliable and affordable service for every customer, even if it means scrapping standard practices and adopting new ones. 

For example, while many of our wireless customers are on an unlimited data plan, we also realize there are individuals and families who will struggle to keep their plans going, and the last thing they should have to worry about right now is running out of data or losing service.

We’re doing everything we can to make sure these customers stay connected during these challenging times. That’s why we’re waiving overage charges and late fees, and refusing to terminate anybody’s service.

But we recognize that serving customers means more than just keeping them plugged in. We’re automatically adding 15 GB of high-speed 4G LTE data to our consumer and small-business plans, in response to increased usage. To help our lower-income customers, we’re also offering a discount on broadband service.

In addition to these boosts in connectivity, we’re making content readily available to all customers. This includes everything from interactive-study tools to premium entertainment channels like Showtime and Disney+. 

We’ve also expanded our website to include frequent updates on new services, as well as highlight relevant topics as keeping your smartphone clean, setting limits on kids’ on-screen time, and handling work-related video calls at home. 

But even with all of these efforts, there are some hard limits to what we can do right now. In response to the current and continued impact of COVID-19, we had to put the safety of our employees and customers first and temporarily closed many of our locations, and reduced hours in others. 

We also had to reduce the number of customers who could be in a store at any one time, until eventually we suspended all store operations except for on-site merchandise pickups. While our retail presence is limited, we are redeploying and training many of our retail employees to leverage their skills and hunger to contribute to the business in new ways. However, it’s certainly not business as usual, and all of these shifts in our standard practices have placed new demands on our employees, who, at the end of the day, are human and balancing responsibilities at work and on the home front. 

I am deeply grateful for the patience, strength, and resilience our colleagues are demonstrating every day. It’s a profound honor to care for our customers and provide an essential service that has restored some sense of normalcy and comfort. Connectivity enables doctors and nurses to treat, students to learn, first responders to protect, businesses to survive and families to stay connected.

Through all the changes we and our customers have been through recently, our employees have responded with agility, ingenuity, and a deep commitment to serving our customers – at a time when that service is needed more than ever before.

We can’t predict what the next few weeks bring, but I have never been more proud to be a V Teamer as we keep the world connected and help our communities rise up and recover.