Verizon Wholesale Service Units Receive International Quality Assurance Certification

NEW YORK - Four more Verizon work centers that serve wholesale customers in the Northeast and mid-Atlantic region have earned the prestigious ISO 9000 certification from the International Organization for Standardization. Three wholesale customer centers received certification last year.

Independent certification of the Verizon work centers' ability to serve other telecommunications companies known as competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs) continues to demonstrate that the company has put in place a quality system and work processes to handle requests from those wholesale customers. These centers handle CLEC provisioning and maintenance requests for various wholesale products.

The Verizon wholesale centers receiving the new certification are:
• The Regional CLEC Maintenance Center in Richmond, Va.

• The CLEC Loop Provisioning Centers in Hunt Valley, Md., and in New York City.

• The Regional Coordination Center in New York City, which is responsible for processing orders related to the re-use of facilities after retail customers change carriers.

Three other Verizon wholesale centers received ISO certification last year: the Verizon Regional CLEC Coordination Centers in Boston, Mass., and in Hunt Valley, Md., and the Regional CLEC Maintenance Center in East Brunswick, N.J. They were re-certified this year.

"Our wholesale team has worked very hard to implement a comprehensive quality program focused on customer needs, operations excellence and continuous improvement," said Ray Wierzbicki, group president of CLEC wholesale resale/unbundled services for Verizon. "The achievement of ISO 9000 certification demonstrates that we are serious about investing in our people, processes and technology to provide excellent service to our wholesale customers."

The International Organization for Standardization is an independent worldwide federation of national standards bodies, with members in over 120 countries throughout the world.

The group named the certification ISO, using the first part of the Latin word isosceles, which means equal or oneness. This reflects the organization's goal for a common set of universally accepted quality standards. The ISO 9000 standard is a specific set of quality management system requirements, which includes all the activities a company or organization performs to ensure that its product or service meets the expectation of customers with a primary focus on satisfaction and continual improvement.

The Verizon wholesale centers began working toward certification in early 2000. An ISO 9000 auditor completed an initial documentation audit in May 2000, and the first certification was completed in November 2000 for the "hot-cut" process in which the lines of retail customers are changed from one carrier to another. Every six months new centers and products are candidates for the certification process.

"As we work to gain and maintain this certification, we have created unified, standard regional processes for the various CLEC requests," Wierzbicki said. "Going through this in-depth process enabled us to create consistent, reliable methods and procedures for serving our wholesale customers. Most importantly, we systematically encourage team members to submit ideas for corrective and preventive actions. We are proud of what our team has accomplished, and we look forward to continuing to apply what we learned and established in these centers elsewhere within Verizon."

Verizon Communications

Verizon Communications (NYSE:VZ) is one of the world's leading providers of communications services. Verizon companies are the largest providers of wireline and wireless communications in the United States, with 128.5 million access line equivalents and 28.7 million wireless customers. Verizon is also the largest directory publisher in the world. A Fortune 10 company with 256,000 employees and approximately $65 billion in annual revenues, Verizon's global presence extends to more than 40 countries in the Americas, Europe, Asia and the Pacific. For more information on Verizon, visit www.verizon.com.