Verizon’s HCL Gamble

Tony:
Hello today is Tuesday, September 9, 2025, I’m Tony Mangino from TC2 and this is Staying Connected.

In August 2023, Verizon Business and HCL Tech announced a global strategic partnership whereby Verizon retained responsibility for sales, solutioning, and customer acquisition and HCL Tech would handle post-sale implementation and ongoing support for Verizon’s enterprise customers.    It’s now 2 years later. We are here today.

I’m joined today by my colleagues Theresa Knutson and Brent Knight, who’ve been tracking this transition, for an update on how the strategic partnership has impacted enterprise customers.

Great to have you both here.

Brent:
Thanks, Tony, great to be here.

Theresa:
Yes, great to be here too.  Let’s jump in as there is much to discuss.

As you mentioned at the onset, Verizon and HCL have a partnership where HCL is now providing post sale implementation and ongoing support for Verizon’s enterprise customers.  

HCL is headquartered in India and while some of Verizon’s US based employees were transitioned to HCL, most support is now provided by HCL employees in India.  This is a significant change, especially for enterprise customers who were used to having US-based post-sales and support resources from Verizon.    

Brent:
The services that were outsourced to HCL are post-sales functions like management network services, order management, implementation services and operational support.  These are all services that occur after a deal is signed and are critically important to the successful relationship between Verizon and their customer.  

Tony:
So why did Verizon enter into this outsourcing relationship with HCL?

Brent:
You really just have to follow the money. Like all companies, Verizon improves their bottom-line buy cutting costs.  The relationship with HCL allows Verizon to leverage HCL’s lower cost and typically off-shore support model.  Verizon’s previous support model would’ve been with mostly U.S. based support persons and as we see across many businesses, they can lower their support cost by off-shoring support, but the question always comes back to at what quality of support cost??

Tony:
Competition is fierce. By moving post-sale support to HCL, HCL handles the heavy lifting,  while Verizon is focused on chasing new deals and at the same time saving Verizon money.   

Brent:
HCL isn’t a small subcontractor. Gartner recognizes HCL in “Voice of the Customer” reports for IT services, including Managed Network Services and Digital Workplace outsourcing.  On paper, the partnership looks great – blending Verizon’s network scale and HCL’s support expertise.

Theresa:
Verizon has taken a huge risk here—they’ve basically put their entire enterprise customer satisfaction at the hands of a partner.   Verizon relies on renewals of contracts with existing customers and references from existing customers to win new business. 

In our collective experience at TC2 with over 25 years negotiating network deals for our clients, a key differential between suppliers is often the service and support provided by the account teams. While the sales support was retained by Verizon, all other services were outsourced to HCL.  

Tony:
How is the partnership performing for customers?

Brent:
Here’s where it gets tricky: there are no formal customer surveys or satisfaction reports specifically tied to this partnership. Nobody’s published hard data on how enterprise clients feel.   What we do have is we’ve informally spoken with some of our top clients about their experiences as it relates to this new HCL support model and I’m going to pass this back to Theresa to provide some of that direct feedback.   

Theresa:
The direct feedback we’ve gotten from several of our large Fortune 100 level enterprise customers is that this support model is not working.  

There are two models from Verizon for post-sales and ongoing support—historically, this support was provided at no incremental cost to customers.   The overhead to support customers was included in the price of the underlying service.   As a result of Verizon thinning out the account and service teams over the past few years, Verizon then pushed customers to use their portal for support (yea, VEC) and to a  “paid support” model whereby their customers were required to incrementally pay this support (think terms like PMO) personnel at a “not so insignificant” cost in order to get the service and support needed to use the Verizon services.  

This “paid for service” model required customers to sign contracts with commitments—typically 2-3 years or more, sometimes supported by detailed SOWs and sometimes with little documentation on what the paid support covered. Under the “paid support model”, customers should have a say in the number, types and location of resources assigned to them, which needs to be clearly articulated in the underlying contract.

Tony:
Support under both of these models has been outsourced to HCL.

Theresa:
I have a client who had been paying for support from Verizon for years and highly valued the support that was delivered by a named Verizon resource in the US who acted as an extension of our client’s team-who was uber responsive, followed up, knew the client’s business.  This person was abruptly removed in Q4 2024 and replaced by an HCL resource with very little, if any, transition.  

My enterprise client is no longer satisfied with this support (that they are paying a premium for), has put HCL on a performance improvement plan and likely will cancel this paid support service as the value proposition was decimated.   And worse yet, the cost of this support did not decrease for my client when the resources were swapped out—they are paying the same for subpar support vs what they had previously enjoyed.   This is a recipe for disaster and this same sentiment  is echoed by several of our large Fortune 100 clients. 

Tony:
It’s definitely a complicated picture.  

Brent:
Yeah, you not only have the hiccups that occur with any support transition, but you also have the simple loss of tribal knowledge of how you operate and interact – supplier and customer.  For many of our customers, they’ve lost that security blanket of knowing who to reach out to when they have a problem and knowing that person will know them and how to get their issue resolved.  So losing that tribal knowledge and trying to re-develop it with a whole new set of people doesn’t happen with a snap of your fingers, it can take years and what we’re hearing so far now is that isn’t happening very well at all.

Theresa:
The feedback we’ve gathered is that almost all the resources were swapped out for less experienced ones. One client had to negotiate strongly to hang on to a few named folks in their PMOs.  Back-office teams are slow to respond with basic issues taking months to resolve. Voice and data connectivity to HCL for calls is not great. I’ve been on several calls where, ironically, due to network issues, you can’t clearly hear the HCL team members.

Tony:
So what’s the verdict right now?

Brent:
From an enterprise customer perspective, the results have not been good.  Support transition has not been seamless and customers are frustrated to the point that they’ll look for alternatives if Verizon and HCL can’t improve the service and meet their support expectations.

Theresa:
Transitions are hard but they’ve now had 2 years to “iron out the kinks” in deploying these services and the feedback we are getting is not good.   When the sales team starts feeling it in loss of business (i.e. losing commissions) and reported revenues to Wall Street decline, things will change.   Or Verizon will simply just increase more wireless fees to make up the delta!

Brent:
We’ll be hosting a future podcast that provides advice on how to address these issues, whether you’re renewing your existing contract or competitively bidding services in the marketplace. We’ll have some good recommendations to share.

Theresa:
Yes, and we will share more commentary from clients around service and support issues that they’ve experienced and not just with Verizon, so please join us for our next podcast.

Tony:
Thanks Theresa and Brent. This is one to watch.

To our listeners, if you would like to learn more about what the Verizon HCL partnership might mean for your enterprise, or if you’d like to discuss other technology strategy, sourcing and cost reduction needs with Theresa, Brent, me, or any of our TC2 and LB3 colleagues, please give us a call or shoot us an email. 

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