Most quarterly earnings reports and the investor calls that accompany them are not worth paying attention to unless your job involves stock prices. The conversations that are had during these calls might even make you sick, as they often talk in financial speak about taking advantage of customers to increase value for shareholders. Yesterday, though, Verizon’s Q3 earnings call was a must-listen with new CEO Dan Schulman speaking at length for the first time and admitting how poorly Verizon treated their customers under previous leadership, before promising a “full reboot” of the company that aims to delight customers.

We recapped (here) Schulman’s statement on the Q3 earnings call, but there was also a letter he shared with Verizon employees that essentially repeats most of what he said. Schulman talked about 3 ways they plan to change to “delight [customers] in every way” going forward. Those areas will be: customer experience, market success, and operational excellence. For you and I, it’s the first that we care the most about.

Before the Verizon board fired Hans Vestberg earlier in the month, the company had spent the previous month pissing off its most loyal customers. We’ll likely never know if that month brought us to this change at the top, but I like to think it certainly pushed the board to finally do what was needed long before.

I’m talking about August, where a series of events from Verizon were as anti-customer as it gets. Verizon first took away loyalty discounts that it’s most loyal customers had enjoyed for several years, a removal that would substantially increase bills by the hundreds of dollars over a year. We then learned that device activation fees were increasing, that Verizon had quietly updated tablet plans, and that they even managed to take perks away from older plans, like Apple Arcade and Google Play Pass. Of course, they then reversed course on the loyalty discount thing within about a week and started giving people pretty heavy discounts again, possibly at a higher value than folks previously had. It was all a lot to take in. It was all very gross.

The conversation around these moves certainly made it seem as if August was the moment that would push many to leave Verizon. I know a number of our readers called it quits following the events I just talked through. By early October, Verizon had replaced Hans with Dan.

Within a couple of weeks of Schulman taking over, we already saw the first signs of their ideas around “delighting” customers. Many received unprompted loyalty discount offers with “no catch,” a welcomed surprise after being told only weeks prior that such discounts were going away. And now, a new CEO is promising even more.

In his letter to Verizon employees, Schulman wouldn’t dive into specifics on how they plan to be a customer-first company, but did say “We must eliminate friction points, simplify our plans and make it easier to do business with us.” That piece about the plans will be the one to watch, as Verizon’s current myPlan plans have been a tough sell since the day they were introduced. There’s a reason Verizon has spent the past several years pulling every lever it has to increase prices on those holding onto older plans – no one wanted the new plans.

Eliminating friction and making it easier to do business with sounds a lot like addressing the complaints we often see about the current state of Verizon’s customer service. He further added that this also means they’ll focus on “relentlessly improving our customers’ experiences,” because “delighting” them goes beyond just “satisfying” them.

Rarely do we see companies openly admit that they have failed in the ways Verizon has in recent years. The quarterly numbers and the postpaid losses have never not been shocking to see, especially as T-Mobile and AT&T have figured out how to add millions of new customers during this same dark period. At least they finally realized they needed big changes and are saying the right things. Is it too late for Verizon? Well, no. They are too big for it to be too late, but can they find a way to win with a customer-first culture? With only 3 major carriers competing in a US wireless market that feels more expensive and more restrictive by the month, we can only hope.

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