Unleashing the power of data — how Michael Cingari's team at Verizon Business is reimagining B2B customer experiences

In the fast-moving world of technology and connectivity, agility, digital-first experience, and customer centricity are critical elements for differentiation.

Verizon Business is an industry leader and leverages Adobe Experience Cloud to keep this advantage strong. The marketing technology team — serving as a center of excellence for content, data, audience, analysis, and journey orchestration — is driving a shift from channel-centricity to customer-centricity. The company is meeting the customer where they want to be met.

At the Adobe Executive Forum — an invitation-only event for industry leaders driving experience-led growth — Adobe Insider Katie Martell sat down with the VP of marketing, Michael Cingari. His team had just been announced as a finalist in the 2023 Adobe Experience Maker Awards for the Team of the Year category, and we were eager to hear his advice.

https://video.tv.adobe.com/v/3424119

Martell: Tell me about your role at Verizon Business.

Cingari: I’ve been at Verizon for 24 years, starting as an engineer before getting a master’s degree in technology and management. I moved into finance, operations, customer service, and sales roles — and eventually found myself in marketing. I took with me the principle of leveraging technology and data in every role I held.

Realizing that there was a major need within the marketing industry to use big data and leading martech, we were early believers that a critical shift in investment and strategy needed to happen in this area. We strive to become more personalized in our experiences by using AI to analyze our customer behaviors and drive real-time one-to-one journeys at scale. Our pioneering work has been recognized three years in a row on the Experience Makers stage and has also won multiple other industry awards.

Today I lead marketing science and customer experience at Verizon Business, which brings martech, customer analytics, and experience together within the marketing team. I’m inspired by the other companies here (at Adobe Executive Forum) who are finding success like us by bringing technologists and data scientists closer to the business.

Martell: How does data, technology, and creativity combine at Verizon Business?

Cingari: It's important to have a holistic organizational approach that focuses on building AI models at scale, connecting them to our customer journeys and continuously improving through feedback. That’s what drove the genesis of the marketing science organization. A strong model ecosystem, data-driven decisioning, and customer journey orchestration anchored on a simplified technology stack — that is how we unlocked this scale. There is also a culture shift that has to be embraced through continuous upskilling, new operating models, and a strong technology enablement function.

Our marketers and technologists cannot operate in silos. Marketers need to embrace an innovation mindset, and our technology teams need to deeply understand the business to evangelize new capabilities. It's a shared success and co-innovation model that ultimately achieves marketing outcomes.

Here at Verizon, I’ve seen 3G, 4G, and we are now on the eve of 5G and what will become the cutting edge of the new industrial revolution with technology and connectivity.

It’s now a massive opportunity to keep up with the times and changing customer expectations, ensuring we’re bringing not just transactional data but their behavioral data as the industry shifts.

Martell: Tell me about the changing expectations of your buyers.

Cingari: The B2B customer and overall industry is moving toward “just-in-time” models and digital-first experiences. New breeds of startup and SaaS businesses demand this change as well. In addition, the expectation of tailored and personalized experiences has always been table stakes.

We want to be easy to do business with. We have one of the largest B2B sales teams in the domestic US that interacts daily with enterprise customers. We want to ensure we keep personalization while blending insights from all of our data. We need to deliver insight to both the customer and the frontline reps to keep the interaction personal and simple.

Martell: How has your collaboration been with Adobe?

Cingari: When we first started out, consolidating over 50 technology partners was critical as we couldn’t use everything to scale. The market is shifting constantly, so it’s very important to have a stable and scalable partner ecosystem. We took a concerted effort to rationalize that portfolio of true partners, Adobe being one of them, to innovate and ideate with.

We partner and co-innovate very closely across their existing product set and future innovations as well. We are strongly networked across all functions — including support, customer success, product, and engineering so that there is laser focus on joint priorities. I just recently spent time with Adobe’s product engineers, and as an engineer myself, I was excited to sit down with developers and explain what we need to do, what we are hoping to do in the future, and finding out how Adobe could help us. Having a tight-knit group of partners and one common platform makes our ecosystem more manageable for our IT teams.

My marketers know the technology and they know what data is available to them. We have them run through all of the Adobe tech trainings just to make sure they understand the capabilities and the tools. Because of this, they’re collaborating with our data scientists to request AI models.

This is so important. You’ve got to bring your data scientists and technologists to the table from the beginning.

Martell: How do you think about the future of the customer experience at Verizon?

Cingari: It’s really about real-time decisioning and real-time marketing.

We now have a system and a platform where our offers and our next best actions follow the customer instead of following the channel.

For example, if you go into any retail store, you’re going to hear the same dialogue as if you engaged with us digitally. Now, we have everything following the customer — customized and personalized. We’ve got to do all of that at scale.

We are continuing to consolidate our data to build a 360-degree view of the customer to get consistency across the globe and with all of our channels.

We take millions of calls a month. How do we extract insight from those calls and transactions? Millions of customers visit our websites. How do we extract that behavioral data and understand where the customer is in their journey so we can better predict?

We don’t just sell cell phones anymore, we don’t just sell connectivity. We have thousands of products, millions of customers, and countless permutations each and every month within these interactions.

Martell: Where does generative AI play a role in this context?

Cingari: Generative AI, especially in large language models, can really synthesize mass amounts of information and data and place it all at the fingertips of marketers, our sales reps, and even our customers.

We are fairly mature in our AI model ecosystem. We started with 18 different AI models three years ago, and today we’re at 250 models with 80 million scores going into our data warehouse every month.

Our models can now answer where customers are in their lifecycle, if they are likely to buy, likely to leave, wanting a different product or solution, define how they’d like to be served, and what lifestyle, message, content, and imagery we should show to them.

Generative AI can help us scale personalization with all these dynamic and rich insights around our customers from a content, product, and experience perspective across all channels — email, digital, and assisted.

That is the biggest unlock achieved — and evolving our AI practice.

Martell: What inspires you every day?

Cingari: I have two daughters, Emma and Ellie, and my wife Diana. No matter where you are in the corporate world, you are reminded when you come home that your place is always as a husband and dad.

They help me be a better marketer because they are closer to technology and can see trends that happen before we do. One example is that the younger generation doesn’t care about mobile telephone numbers — it’s now about Snapchat or Instagram.

Martell: And what keeps you going in this fast-moving role?

Cingari: In all my jobs and roles, I’ve been told “You’re too tactical and not strategic,” but I believe that’s how you get things done. My best marketers know the technology, and they know what data is available to them.

This is the longest job I’ve had at Verizon, and it’s because of my team. They’re the reason for my energy every day. I’m proud to be part of a group of early adopters and first movers in the industry. It’s amazing to me to hear about all of the creative and innovative work they do on a daily basis. That’s what drives me to get up in the morning, seeing the endless possibilities.

Katie Martell is an Adobe Insider, creator, and marketing strategist based in Boston, Massachusetts. As we navigate the digital age, she amplifies stories of transformation and trends in business, CX, and marketing. Martell has been named “one of the most interesting people in B2B marketing,” a top voice to follow on LinkedIn, and an Adweek Pride Star.