Minding the gap

When your company's long-term challenges involve such things as wringing as much cost out of your operations as possible, optimizing the performance of the technologies in your network and trying to keep customers happy in a competitive environment, it must be easy to overlook the day-to-day minutiae of things--the things that, while seemingly routine, can potentially make or break you. As president of national operations for Verizon, Eileen Odum is charged with--among other things--making sure her company doesn't do that.

Odom--who oversees the carrier's installation, maintenance and outside plant construction organizations, including a workforce of about 54,000--told Telephony recently that one of her priorities is to make its service calls much more timely. In other words, she wants Verizon to be among the first customer service organizations to not have to tell customers their technicians will be there to fix their problems next Thursday sometime between dawn and dusk.

"We want to get to a two-hour appointment strategy," Odum said. "By improving the efficiency of each person doing the work, we'll keep more customers, and we'll earn some back. It's a competitive table stake."

Verizon will work toward that goal in a number of ways, Odum said. For example, it can't necessarily predict when trouble will occur or how long it will take to fix, she said, but it can use workforce management tools that allow its technicians to provide real-time status reports as they're doing the work, to better estimate completion time. It can also use GPS technology to make sure its dispatchers are sending technicians with the right skills and tools to the right places as quickly and efficiently as possible.

"We really have to look at every aspect of how we define the work, and what information we record about work in progress," Odum said. "That's the only way we can get to the point of making and keeping tight appointments throughout the day."

Odum discussed many other issues critical to Verizon's network operations and customer service, including ongoing contract negotiations with union labor, making the network more efficient, Verizon's expectations about extending fiber to the customer premises, even the privacy implications of using GPS technology in fleet tracking and workforce management. (Look for more of the interview with Odum in an upcoming column.) But for some reason, her comments about the two-hour appointment goal resonated the most. At a time when the priorities and expectations of carriers and their customers are more advanced than ever before, concentrating on improving one of the most basic--and, perhaps, most overlooked--elements of customer service somehow seems very insightful.

E-mail me at jmeyers@primediabusiness.com.