Verizon Business Treats Every Week as Customer Service Week

BASKING RIDGE, N.J. – When it comes to focusing first and foremost on customers, Verizon Business doesn’t wait until October.

“Yes, this is Customer Service Week, and yes, we’ll honor our hard-working employees behind the scenes who create a world-class experience for enterprise and government customers,” said Kevin Gahan, vice president of global service management at Verizon Business. “But Verizon Business employees know we serve some of the largest, most demanding customers in the world. To keep earning their business, we have to put them first, every day of the week.”

Verizon Business focuses on six areas that matter to customers:

• Providing customers what they need, when they need it
• Keeping customers informed
• Keeping things from breaking
• When an issue occurs, fixing it fast
• Billing customers accurately
• aking it easy for customers to do business with Verizon Business

“The reason we keep earning industry awards for outstanding customer service is that we continually challenge ourselves to focus on areas that are meaningful to our customers,” said Gahan.

Among this year’s recognitions, J.D. Power and Associates ranked Verizon Business highest for customer satisfaction among large-enterprise providers for both data and voice service providers, and Frost & Sullivan named Verizon Business Premier North American Provider of Managed IP Telephony Services.

Provide customers what they need, when they need it
To provide business and government customers what they need, when they need it, Verizon Business goes well beyond the typical customer service assessment tools, such as surveys and intra-company collaborative groups. The company measures on-time ordering performance by using the Customer Desired Due Date (CDDD). The customer determines the delivery date and Verizon Business tracks its own effectiveness against that date – rather than Verizon Business setting the date for the customer. Using this tougher standard, Verizon Business has delivered on time more than 90 percent of orders in the past 12 months.

Keep customers informed
Launched in 2008, the Verizon Enterprise Center (VEC), a self-service Web portal for business and government customers, quickly was named Telephony Magazine’s most innovative enterprise service. Customers can conduct real-time account management, make payments, test circuits, create, view and update trouble tickets, and even receive weather notifications from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) to help plan for contingencies.

This past summer, Verizon introduced additional functionality with the Verizon Enterprise Center Mobile, enabling Verizon customers to now receive and access information in near-real time on a mobile device.

Keep things from breaking
From 2006 to 2008, Verizon invested $3 billion in its global network serving business and government customers. This year, the company plans to spend at a similar annual level.

Key improvements include expanded network reach, improved remote provisioning, testing and network resiliency. The global reach of Verizon’s network, combined with the ability to remotely provision services at the lightwave level, means reduced delivery and repair times for customers.

Relying on the company’s mesh architecture also means traffic can be re-routed within milliseconds around network disruptions. Meshing is a technologically advanced network configuration that provides more diverse routes in the event of a network issue.

When an issue occurs, fix it fast
In addition to constantly improving its processes, the company uses a variety of award-winning back-office tools such as IMPACT. The patent-pending IMPACT system is a network management suite that performs automatic alarm detection, fault isolation, trouble-ticket generation, event and maintenance correlation, customer notification and updates without the manual intervention of network support staff.

As an "always on" solution, IMPACT provides Verizon Business managed services customers with proactive network updates via cell phone, BlackBerry, pager, e-mail or any communication device of choice.

Bill customers accurately
In 2006, Verizon Business began an intensive billing consolidation project with five areas of focus: system consolidation, electronic billing, a single bill, process improvements and contract billing.

Fundamental to all these focus areas is a centralized, standard data storage platform that results in consistent billing data as well as easy-to-use tools that provide varying levels of analytics and reports. A standard record format also allows customers to have billing reports generated in a variety of media such as CDs, paper and electronic formats such as electronic data interface (EDI).

Make it easy for customers to do business
The Verizon Business Customer Loyalty Board is an internal group that meets regularly to measure the effectiveness of the company’s customer service efforts. Customer surveys are reviewed by everyone involved with each customer. The results of the surveys are then turned into specific actions across company departments, including operations, finance, legal, human resources and information technology.

“Great customer service is about building loyalty,” said Gahan. “We build loyalty by earning our customers’ trust each and every day. It’s a journey that never ends because there are always ways we can improve the customer experience.”

Verizon Business is a recognized leader in delivering advanced communications and information technology (IT) solutions to government agencies and large business customers around the world. Earlier this year, the company was ranked highest in overall customer satisfaction among large enterprises for both data and voice services by J.D. Power and Associates in its annual study of home-based, small to mid-sized and large-enterprise customers. In the annual study, J.D. Power and Associates determined that Verizon Business ranked “Highest in Customer Satisfaction with Large Enterprise Business Data and Business Voice Service Providers.” Study factors used to measure satisfaction included performance and reliability, sales representatives/account executives, billing, cost of service, customer service and offerings and promotions.

Verizon Business received the highest numerical score among data and voice service providers in the proprietary J.D. Power and Associates 2009 Major Provider Business Telecommunications Services Study – Data Services and Voice ServicesSM. U.S. home-based, small to mid-sized and large-enterprise business customers were surveyed to measure customer satisfaction with providers of telecommunications data services such as cable modem, DSL, T1, T3/DS3, IP-based networks for VPNs, Ethernet services, videoconferencing applications, Web site hosting and managed services, and voice services such as voice-over-IP (VoIP), call center technologies, toll-free services, voicemail/voice messaging, Centrex services, call forwarding, and local and long distance services. The surveys were conducted in January and April 2009.

About Verizon Business
Verizon Business, a unit of Verizon Communications (NYSE: VZ), is a global leader in communications and IT solutions. We combine professional expertise with one of the world’s most connected IP networks to deliver award-winning communications, IT, information security and network solutions. We securely connect today’s extended enterprises of widespread and mobile customers, partners, suppliers and employees — enabling them to increase productivity and efficiency and help preserve the environment. Many of the world’s largest businesses and governments — including 96 percent of the Fortune 1000 and thousands of government agencies and educational institutions — rely on our professional and managed services and network technologies to accelerate their business. Find out more at www.verizonbusiness.com.

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