Dive Brief:
- Improvements to Verizon’s customer experience helped the wireless carrier reduce customer churn for the second consecutive quarter and achieve positive postpaid phone net additions, executives said on a Q2 2026 earnings call Friday.
- Verizon delivered 184,000 postpaid phone net additions during the second quarter of 2026, up from 9,000 postpaid phone net losses in the same period last year, EVP and CFO Tony Skiadas said. Overall churn fell to 0.92%, “reflecting the improvements we were making with the customer experience.”
- The company sees lower churn as the path to growing its customer base and strength as a company, Skiadas said. “The key to reducing churn is becoming a customer-centric organization, and we are well on our way.”
Dive Insight:
Verizon has made a slate of changes to its operations aimed at creating a better end-to-end experience that can help the company continue its turnaround.
Verizon revamped its loyalty program in June, among other adjustments aimed at improving the customer value proposition, CEO Dan Schulman said. The changes have led to improvements “well beyond our expectations across every metric.”
Verizon Shine, which offers a combination of contests and offers, replaced the Verizon Access loyalty program. Rewards range from perks like gift cards to sweepstakes with prizes including celebrity meetups.
The wireless carrier’s loyalty plan also includes Verizon Dollars. Members receive 3% of money spent on monthly bills back as credit that can be spent at select partner companies. Both aspects of the program are open to all subscribers.
“Every Verizon customer — not a tier, not a segment, not a subset — has access to our full loyalty program with no plan change required,” Schulman said on the call.
The loyalty changes are being paired with changes designed to improve CX across the customer journey, according to Schulman.
“We've been investing in every part of that end-to-end customer journey, from the in-store experience to our digital channels, to our billing, to our customer service — we literally have hundreds of micro-initiatives running in the company, going after every single pain point that consumers might have with Verizon, and we're making great progress on that,” Schulman said.
Despite improvements to churn and postpaid phone net additions, Verizon’s consolidated net income fell 22.9% year over year to $3.9 billion, according to an earnings release. The decline was in part attributed to costs associated with a joint venture to combine Verizon’s international wireline business with BT Group PLC.
