- Verizon CEO Dan Schulman reiterated that network leadership still matters, but customer experience has to be No. 1
- Differentiation isn’t about one thing – Verizon needs to do “hundreds of things” extraordinarily well to regain market share
- The CEO talked about much more sophisticated customer segmentation, setting off alarm bells on what exactly they’re up to
Verizon CEO Dan Schulman has been in the top job for more than six months. What’s he got to show for it?
Plenty, if you ask him. But he’s just getting started – and make no mistake, he’s playing to win.
“If we want to reclaim our market leadership across all elements, we need to be intense inside the company,” he told analyst Craig Moffett at the MoffettNathanson investor conference Wednesday. “We need to play to win. We need to do all those small things extremely well.”
Part of his game plan is to reduce headcount. In November, Verizon announced it was laying off 13,000 employees. This month, the company added more job cuts, including 121 in its home state of New Jersey.
That can’t be good for morale, but it wasn’t a big part of the conversation on Wednesday.
Customer experience front and center
One of the priorities Schulman’s been talking about is shifting from a network-engineering focused company to one where they’re putting the customer front and center. That doesn’t mean they’re throwing network prowess out the window.
“Objectively speaking, Verizon still has the best network in the industry. If you look at most measures, like seven out of eight, we have the best network. Having network superiority is incredibly important to me. I want to compete on that,” he said.
However, it isn’t the only thing. “What I tell the team is network excellence is foundational, but it's not enough. I want to do more than that, and really it is about the end-to-end customer experience,” he said.
Schulman also said that Verizon’s customer satisfaction scores were at a record high in the last quarter. “That’s outstanding progress in that. To me, differentiation is not one thing… It’s hundreds of things that you need to do extraordinarily well,” he said.
Verizon CEO on differentiation
Moffett pressed on the need for competitive differentiation. There’s no silver bullet to achieve that, Schulman said. If there were, “I would have done it already and by the way, all my competitors would have done it as well.”
He has a team focused on a host of metrics where he expects to see improvements on a steady basis. “I have a mantra inside the company that ‘Every day matters.’ I want to see what we did better today than we did yesterday,” he said.
Judging by the numbers, it appears Schulman is making progress. Verizon added 55,000 postpaid phone subscribers in Q1 2026, beating analysts’ expectations for a loss of 84,000 customers and reversing the prior year’s Q1 loss of 289,000 customers. Postpaid wireless phone churn was 0.97%, down from 1.02% in Q4 2025, according to an April 27 Moffett report.
How will Verizon differentiate?
But the question persists: How is Verizon going to differentiate itself?
AT&T stresses convergence, for example. T-Mobile, which claimed the “best network” title last year, offers tons of perks and for years has used T-Mobile Tuesdays to give away all kinds of free stuff and discounts, from chicken wings to movie tickets and DoorDash.
During Verizon’s 4Q 2025 earnings call in January, Schulman teased that Verizon would be introducing a new “value proposition” this year, but he gave no details. He also talked about how “every individual customer will have a tailored proposition.” Since then, we’re not aware of any further details being shared.
Verizon as predator vs. prey
With Moffett on Wednesday, Schulman talked about how he’s positioning Verizon no longer as prey for his competitors but as the predator, a message he’s carried since taking the top spot in October.
Toward that end, Verizon was just getting into the ring in the fourth quarter and saying: “If you’re going to hit us, we’re going to hit back hard,” he said. The first quarter of 2026 was very different, focusing more on market segmentation and moving away from free handset giveaways as the answer to everything.
“We're so used to doing things the way we did them, as opposed to being massively analytical, very sophisticated modeling,” Schulman said, suggesting they’re considering customer segmentation of not just four segments in the market, but “hundreds of thousands” of segments. “That's the sophistication that we're driving towards.”
Segmented marketing?
That set off alarm bells for some folks, who wondered on LinkedIn if this means Verizon is going to take customers’ personal data and use it to charge different prices for different classes of customers, sort of akin to reports of airlines charging different prices based on affluence.
Roger Entner, founder of Recon Analytics, doesn’t suspect that’s what’s going on. “This is not like a James Bond-style villain’s monologue,” where the bad character recites the pain they’re going to inflict on Bond. “It just points out that you can very finely segment the customer base,” he said.
The tough part comes in marketing and advertising in an effective and efficient way. “The reason nobody’s done it is because it’s really, really hard,” he said.
Companies like Recon Analytics are building finely tuned segmentations for carriers, something he described as fingerprints. “Every carrier has a different customer fingerprint in who they attract,” he said. “The challenge always for these companies is to attract new customers.”
It has to pencil out, too. Verizon, for example, at one time was paranoid about courting an older customer base and went after younger, more multi-ethnic segments, he said. The problem there is younger people tend to earn less money and churn more. By going after a younger demographic, Verizon induced higher churn and lower ARPU.
Meanwhile, the industry at large is changing how it targets different income levels. For example, lower income people on prepaid plans used to pay by the minute, but with “unlimited” plans, they’re paying $40 or $45 a month and getting a better deal, he said.
However, in terms of getting more money from people who make more than $100,000 a year, “the carriers have been incredibly incompetent in delivering them a product they’re willing to pay more for,” he said. “Even ice cream comes in super premium. You have credit cards selling super premium cards very successfully. Everybody can do it but wireless.”