"I dont think anything has started yet."
Of course it started. Customers hear rumors and Verizon has already outsourced at least some of their customer support. Why do you think they're closing call centers? I talked to them about about a work from home agent job. They made it pretty apparent that they didn't want a problem solver -- they wanted someone to "make a response" and quickly shuffle the ticket to a dead letter zone. I guess "we responded within ten minutes" is someone's metric of success.
Essentially they're asking customers to continue to pay premium prices for a degraded product. Customers will pay premium prices for superior service, but not for the same service cheaper companies provide. I mean, why? Hans' past history is proof he doesn't understand this, or if he does understand, he doesn't care. Randomly dumping employees looks good for awhile, but kills a company. Once again -- this is following the same pattern Hans used at Ericsson. At first he was a hero -- made the company bunches of money when he cut the half the employees. Then when they couldn't take care of their customers anymore and started losing money when the customers had to go somewhere else, he was run out on a rail.
But the board knows this. Hans might be their scapegoat in a couple of years, but for now they're pocketing the money.