Verizon CEO hopes drastic changes will win back angry customers
Patricia Battle
Mon, February 2, 2026 at 9:03 PM EST
8 min read
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Verizon, one of the big three U.S. phone carriers, has had a challenging 2025 as it continues to suffer from a troubling consumer trend that’s hurting its business. Amid recent struggles, the company’s new CEO is doubling down on major changes to keep customers happy, lowering the risk of them switching to competitors.
In its most recent earnings report, Verizon revealed that it added 616,000 new postpaid phone customers in the fourth quarter of 2025, the highest number of new postpaid phone customers in the last six years.
However, the company saw its postpaid phone churn, the amount of customers who pulled the plug on service, reach 0.95%, which is 7 basis points higher than the churn it reported for the same quarter in 2024. The company’s operating income also dropped by 32.6% year over year.
The elevated churn comes after Verizon made several bold pricing changes early last year that sparked customer backlash.
For example, in February last year, the company increased the monthly rates for myPlan and New Verizon Plan accounts by $3 to $5, citing “rising operational costs.”
The following month, it hiked the monthly price of its Verizon Mobile Protect Multi-Device plan and Verizon Mobile Secure Multi-Device plan by $8. By August, Verizon’s device activation fee rose from $35 to $40, and the company announced that it was discontinuing loyalty discounts.
Then, in September, it raised its tablet plans by $5 to $10 and hiked two key fees on customers' monthly bills.
As customer backlash over these price increases grew and churn continued to climb, Verizon named Dan Schulman as its CEO in October, replacing Hans Vestberg.
Shortly after stepping into the role, Schulman said loud and clear during an earnings call that month that he wasn’t a fan of the company’s price hikes and vowed to “aggressively transform” the company to “build loyalty and drive significant improvements in retention.”
He later laid off 13,000 employees to “simplify” the company’s operations and better “address the complexity and friction” that frustrate customers, according to an internal memo sent to workers.
Verizon execs flag reasons why phone customers are leaving
As churn continues to rise, Schulman is doubling down on the company’s transformation, claiming in an earnings call on Jan. 30 that Verizon is “driving a customer-obsessed culture deep into the organization.”
“There's no question that Verizon is at a critical inflection point, and there is no doubt that we must radically shift our culture towards the goal of delighting our customers and building a brand that stands for trust so that we can deliver for our shareholders,” said Schulman.
Verizon Chief Financial Officer Anthony Skiadas said during the call that the company’s elevated postpaid phone churn during the fourth quarter is “largely from prior pricing actions as well as competition.”
Related: Verizon cracks down on internet customers violating key rule
Schulman flagged that over the last three years, Verizon’s churn in this segment has increased by 25 basis points, resulting in the loss of 2.25 million customers.
“There are four reasons why people leave us,” said Schulman. “It’s price increases without corresponding value. That just irritates some customers, and we've seen the churn rise as a result of that, and we've stopped doing that, and we're going to start adding value to it.”
“Second is friction in the process, whether it's onboarding, the billing,” he continued. “When they call our customer service, that needs to be flawless, and we need to reduce complexity, and we need to address that. We already have initiatives underway to address each and every one of those things. And then there's price perception and competitive intensity.”
Verizon CEO highlights plan to keep customers from switching
Verizon has indeed been facing heightened competition from rival phone carriers such as AT&T and T-Mobile, which have all been ramping up their deals and perks to attract new customers. Cable giants, such as Comcast and Spectrum, have also been luring new phone customers with bundled phone, internet, and TV service promotions.
To keep customers away from rivals, Verizon is betting big on artificial intelligence to help remove customer pain points and simplify its offers.
“We are determined to be an AI-first company, deploying AI at scale,” said Schulman. “We will use AI to optimize our operations and fundamentally reshape the customer experience. We are leveraging it to simplify offers, personalized interactions and reduce churn through smart, consistent marketing. By using predictive models, we can anticipate customer pain points before they happen, allowing us to solve problems proactively.”
His comments come after Verizon began using AI last summer to improve its customer service. It is also reportedly using AI to scan bills from rival phone carriers to offer customers customized deals.
In addition to AI, Verizon is also relying on convergence opportunities, such as offering bundled phone and internet service deals to customers, to lower churn. This comes after Verizon finalized its $20 billion acquisition of Frontier Communications last month, a move the phone carrier hopes will speed up the delivery of its wireless and internet services to current and new customers.
“First, and obviously crucial to our converged future is the closing of our Frontier acquisition,” said Schulman. “We now have over 30 million fiber passings with a huge cross-sell opportunity as we are significantly underpenetrated with our wireless services in Frontier markets.”
As Verizon doubles down on its turnaround plan, the company predicts that it will welcome 750,000 to 1 million postpaid phone customers this year.
To achieve this goal and retain customers, Schulman emphasized that the company must focus on rebuilding trust. However, this doesn’t mean customers won’t see price increases in the future.
“The first thing is stop doing things customers hate,” said Schulman. “It is not rocket science on that. Fix the end-to-end experience, again, not rocket science, but hard to do on that. And then you start to regain trust. And when you start to regain trust, you can start to put either promises or incremental value in it.
“I'm not saying that we don't do price increases, I'm saying we will not do price increases without value,” he added. “But I do think that there are lots of places where we can add value.”
Verizon’s increased focus on keeping its customers happy comes after it suffered a major service outage last month that left millions of customers across multiple states without phone service for roughly 10 hours, sparking widespread outrage.
So it is vital for the company to concentrate on pleasing customers, especially since a J.D. Power survey last year found that Verizon trails T-Mobile and MVNOs in postpaid phone plan satisfaction.
U.S. consumer satisfaction rates for postpaid phone plans:
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The average consumer satisfaction score for postpaid plans under traditional carriers is 593 (on a 1,000-point scale).
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T-Mobile ranks the highest in the segment with a satisfaction score of 636.
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Verizon takes second place with a 583 score.
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AT&T trails behind Verizon with a satisfaction score of 573.
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MVNOs, however, have an average satisfaction score of 641. Source: J.D. Power
“The findings show that value is the most important driver of the overall experience, followed closely by service quality,” said Carl Lepper, senior director of technology, media and telecom at J.D. Power, in a press release.
Verizon’s turnaround plan is raising eyebrows on Wall Street
After Verizon unveiled its latest earnings report, some analysts are flagging that its increased focus on growing customer numbers may hurt its revenue in the future.
"Verizon Q4 (fourth quarter of 2025) results and guide are setting the stage for Verizon to take a more aggressive posture on subscriber growth, which may come at the cost of some ARPU (average revenue per subscriber) dilution," said Citi analyst Michael Rollins in a report viewed by Investor’s Business Daily.
"While Verizon is also investing to delight customers and improve retention, Q4 results reveal a pick-up in subscriber growth with slower service revenue growth of 1.1% year-over-year," he continued.
Another concern among analysts is the possibility that Verizon will spark a price war with its competitors as it doubles down on attracting customers. In an analyst note, New Street Research analyst David Barden said that Verizon is moving cautiously to prevent this from happening.
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“As we have said in the past, Verizon has the best house in the neighborhood, and they know that a price war will burn down this neighborhood,” said Barden. “If they manage to capture ~200-300k postpaid phone net adds each from AT&T and T-Mobile, it doesn’t hurt those companies meaningfully while also satisfying Verizon’s near-term goal, in our view.”
Despite many analysts predicting Verizon’s future performance under Schulman’s leadership, industry analyst Jeff Kagan said in a press release that the company’s most recent earnings report does not reflect how it will grow over the next few years.
“It has been quite a while since Verizon has shown strength, and investors are understandably impatient to see improvement,” said Kagan.
“We need to give him (Schulman) the time and space required to build momentum and get the ship moving in the right direction again,” he added.
Related: Verizon makes key policy change to slow down fleeing customers
This story was originally published by TheStreet on Feb 2, 2026, where it first appeared in the Retail section. Add TheStreet as a Preferred Source by clicking here.
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