Future Opportunities & Motivation

TRI: Where will your RA function be in 3 years? What areas look fruitful for adding value?

Romano: We have a program to establish RA for every ordering stream and every process within Verizon's retail operation over a 3 year period.

The next stage will be to integrate costs. But it's bigger than that. You need to pull data together from many different sources to optimize business processes.

What we need are tools that enable us to quickly identify process gaps, and help us figure out how to make those processes better from a customer standpoint, not a single product view.

For instance, by adding detailed customer complaint data, the times the customer has called and the reasons for calling, we can start to figure out what's triggering them to call -- and that gives us an opportunity to get in front of them and explain what we can do for them.

Trouble management information is currently not integrated. Ideally every interaction with a customer should tie back into revenue assurance.

TRI: An executive is only as good as the staff that supports her. How do you keep your team at Verizon motivated?

Romano: Luckily for us, billing and revenue assurance is a fascinating and ever evolving field. Change happens often, so that keeps people going.

I'm big on planning and having a vision. I want my team to know that whatever they do during the day is working towards our vision. So explaining how their work fits into our 3-year RA implementation program is important.

My team is also so energized because they know we're doing something unique.