2007 Best Practices Award Winner: Verizon Data Services

As a result of building its own analytical application, Verizon now has a single 360-degree view of the customer across all acquired brands and regions, and it operates with a single, common version of the truth for reporting and analysis.

Category: Customer Intelligence
Solution Sponsor: Teradata

Verizon Communications Inc. delivers communication innovations to mass market, business, government, and wholesale customers. Verizon Wireless serves 59 million customers nationwide; Verizon Business operates one of the most expansive wholly owned global IP networks; and Verizon Telecom deploys the nation’s most advanced fiber-optic network.

Business Impact
In 2003, Verizon Telecom developed Performance Assurance Reporting Suite (PARS), a relational online analytical processing (ROLAP) application that serves as a scalable common point of access for metrics and analytics and operates on top of the company’s active enterprise data warehouse environment from Teradata in the same high-speed server.

PARS has changed the way Verizon does business. With PARS, Verizon now has a single 360-degree view of the customer across all acquired brands and regions, and it operates with a single, common version of the truth for reporting and analysis.

Maturity
Verizon Communications Inc. was formed in 2000 with the merger of Bell Atlantic Corp. and GTE Corp., and the company continued to grow through acquisitions. Verizon had difficulty unifying the diverse markets and product lines of the former companies and reconciling data across markets and regions. Verizon recognized the need for universal access to a central data repository to expedite data queries and provide valuable customer insight.

Verizon’s initiative began with an Active Enterprise Data Warehouse (aEDW), which served to aggregate metrics across hierarchies. Verizon sought insight through customer and product data to successfully promote its offerings.

Relevance
PARS is an example of an application designed specifically to fit the needs of its users. It has proved its worth to both Verizon business and executives. Metrics generated from PARS are now used across the organization for fast insights into the business performance, and the application has become the official source for internal and external metrics.

Innovation
PARS is a unique application, designed by Verizon and tailored to fit the needs of its users. Developed in-house, PARS combines data on individual customers from several billing systems as well as data sources on demographics, operations, and competitive gains and losses.  All this info is now available on a timely basis with very quick and easy access.

By building its own application, Verizon has saved approximately $2 million in resources and $1 million in licensing fees and maintenance over a four-year period, and also reduced preparation time by 90 percent.