Verizon's Radha Sankaran on Personalizing Customer Experiences and Improving Frontline Decision-Making with Data

Jan 20, 2021

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Joining Cindi today is Radha Sankaran, the Executive Director of Advanced Analytics/AI and ML at Verizon. Radha is a technology executive with more than 24 years of hands-on leadership experience with a proven track record in fast-paced and quality-driven product delivery. She has led and managed high-performance teams in the telecom and wireless industry for 4G LTE, IoT, and 5G technologies.

Today, Radha and Cindi discuss the benefits of personalizing customer experience - including why personalization is Verizon's number one priority moving forward. Radha also shares her strategies for empowering frontline decision makers with data in a way that helps rather than overwhelms, how to protect customers’ privacy while putting their data to best use, and what women in tech aspiring to excel in this field should know to succeed and break the glass ceiling.

Key Takeaways:

Get personal. Leverage data to view your customer’s journey from their perspective. Whether it’s email, SMS, chatbots, in store visits, or interacting with a call center, tie cross-channel experiences together seamlessly to create a positive and personalized experience.
But not too personal. Protecting customers’ data is at the core of everything Verizon does. When building personalized journeys, you have to find the balance between providing a valuable experience for your customer, while not overstepping their privacy in a way that feels invasive.
Empowering frontline employees with data. Compiling and sharing every data point with your team is not helpful. Rather than overwhelming frontline decision makers with mountains of data, distill need-to-know data in a way that’s easy to consume. For Radha, this means equipping her team with only the data needed to determine the next best actions (NBX) for serving customers.
Advice for girls and women in tech. “To all of those women and girls out there wanting to get into STEM, be bold. Don't let anything hold you back."

More About Radha:

Radha Sankaran is the Executive Director of Advanced Analytics/AI and ML at Verizon. She's a technology executive with 24+ years of hands-on leadership experience and a proven track record in fast-paced and quality-driven product delivery, leading and managing high-performance teams in the telecom and wireless industry for 4G LTE, IoT, and 5G technologies. Radha has a strong foundation of strategic thinking, operational excellence, people, and culture development, all anchored in integrity.

She has spent 12.5 years with Verizon and currently serves as the Exec Director of the Systems of Insights portfolio leading Advanced Analytics and AI-Driven Customer Experience Strategy and Development within the Customer Experience Organization for the Consumer Verizon Business.

Before assuming her current position, she was the Executive Director spearheading omnichannel customer experience for all wireless assisted channels in addition to the overarching responsibilities for strategy, architecture, development, analytics, and quality assurance in Verizon IT resulting in annual revenues of $5B to $8B.

Prior to Verizon, Radha spent 13 years at AT&T/Lucent/Avaya until 2007, where she did some pioneering work in the field of HDTV and Synchronous Optical Network (SONET) and CRM technologies. In her last responsibility at Avaya, she was in a technology architect role for implementing the Sales Module in SAP as well as Avaya's multimedia contact center application integrated into Siebel's service management module.

Radha holds a Master's degree in Electrical Engineering from SUNY, Stony Brook.

The Data Chief is presented by our friends at ThoughtSpot. Searching through your company’s data for insights doesn’t have to be complicated. With ThoughtSpot, anyone in your organization can easily answer their own data questions, find the facts, and make better, faster decisions. Learn more at thoughtspot.com.

For full show notes and more, go to thedatachief.com.

Hear more from Cindi Howson here. Sponsored by ThoughtSpot.