Verizon Makes the Right Call With WebFOCUS

Organization Verizon ISP Markets.

The Challenge Provide sales personnel and sales managers with better visibility into sales and enhanced forecasting capabilities. Get customer information to sales reps more quickly. Free IT staff from creating reports so they can better leverage their skill sets.

The Strategy Create a business intelligence environment that lets users obtain their own reports about customer accounts and sales opportunities – even via wireless devices.

The Results A more efficient sales organization, better service to clients, and more effective use of the IT staff.

Information Builders Solution WebFOCUS, WebFOCUS ReportCaster, WebFOCUS Two-Way Email, Information Builders Consulting.

To fill excess capacity on regional and wide-area networks, telecommunications companies are hard at work selling data services, including dedicated Internet access and Web hosting. For the Internet Service Provider (ISP) Markets division of Verizon – which sells bandwidth and internetworking equipment to Internet service providers and application service providers – a tight market requires sales reps to stay constantly on top of new developments within their accounts.

Verizon is meeting the challenge with an enterprise business intelligence platform from Information Builders. Led by Eric Cevis, vice president of the ISP Markets division, the company is using WebFOCUS to create a Web-based reporting application that lets employees quickly analyze account information and create accurate sales forecasts.

"As the telecommunications industry struggles to return to profitability, the days of 'build it and they will come' are over," says Cevis. "With WebFOCUS, we have a business intelligence platform that is ideal for the market realities we face. It helps us automate everything from self-service reporting to mobile information delivery."

Based in Beltsville, Maryland, and with sales offices throughout the United States, Verizon ISP Markets (www.verizon.com/ispmarkets) is a vertical sales channel in Verizon's Enterprise Solutions Group. Its customer base includes a wide range of companies, from large ISPs such as America Online to small regional service providers, all of which resell Internet connectivity to end customers.

Ringing in a Change

Account managers and sales engineers at Verizon ISP Markets continually study the customer environment to keep clients abreast of new products and services. They also keep a close eye on circuit contracts so they can be renewed or upgraded before they expire. Unfortunately, it was difficult for sales personnel to easily access information about each customer account. "When sales personnel needed information, they typically had to send a request to a programmer," recalls Richard Waid, senior staff consultant at Verizon ISP Markets. "Ten days later they would get a report that might or might not contain the information they were looking for."

Waid and his team knew it was time to change the way the organization handled requests for customer account information. "We needed a user-friendly tool that could generate reports without involving our Information Services organization," says Mary Lynn Scanlon, manager of Marketing Services Channel Operations at Verizon ISP Markets. "Our sales people needed better visibility into customer accounts, and our senior managers needed better data-availability to help them make decisions about running the business."

Calling the Business Intelligence Experts

To acquire the necessary technology to build a new reporting environment, Verizon tendered an RFP to software vendors in the OLAP, business intelligence, and decision support markets. "We weighed several vendors against a robust matrix of requirements, including Business Objects, Cognos, and Information Builders," says Scanlon. "Information Builders' WebFOCUS was the only tool that could easily present reports in a variety of formats while integrating data from a wide range of data sources. Additionally, Information Builders worked very hard to build a prototype that demonstrated how WebFOCUS could work with our data. They had a good pricing plan and went the extra mile to work out a deal for us."

Once Verizon had purchased the software, they worked with Information Builders Consulting to build a Web-based application that combines information from various sources, laying the foundation for both standard and ad hoc reporting. They installed WebFOCUS on an IBM Netfinity 7600 server running Microsoft Windows 2000 and created a data mart to store reporting data in a Microsoft SQL Server 2000 database.

Meanwhile, Steve Steele, a senior staff consultant with ISP Markets, attended a three-day training class to learn how to create reports with WebFOCUS. Steele then worked with Information Builders Consulting to create the prototype for an end-user reporting environment. "The learning curve was quick; I became productive right away," says Steele. "We used automatic drill-down and OLAP tools to present information at many levels."

The new system has a user-friendly interface that includes drop-down boxes and radio buttons, making it easy for sales staff and managers to quickly get the information they need to make accurate forecasts, analyze sales opportunities, and understand client accounts and contracts. Users can search by sales person, type of forecast, account, and incident number. They can also drill down to look at increasing levels of detail within these categories.

"The key challenge was to understand the movement of sales opportunities through a sales funnel," says Scanlon. "Before, we had no idea what was going on in the funnel, so it was difficult to track opportunities or make good forecasts. Now we have visibility into the sales funnel, customer accounts, and employee processes."

Putting User Frustration on Hold

The original applications were conceived at the senior management level but quickly proved their worth to the user community. The organization already has 50 account managers using the system. "The response from users has been phenomenal," says Scanlon. "It gives them a tool they didn't have before. It also allows them to develop custom packages for customers."

Putting reporting flexibility into users' hands not only makes them more productive, it also saves Verizon's Information Services department considerable time and effort. "The new WebFOCUS application frees up our IT people to concentrate on things that they need their skill sets for, such as programming," says Waid. "It also adds to productivity by turning reports around in a matter of minutes instead of days."

Verizon ISP Markets often sells services on term. The new WebFOCUS application allows account managers and sales engineers to see what circuits within their accounts are set to expire and respond in advance to the needs of each customer. "They can check what circuits are due to expire in 30, 60, or 90 days – even up to a year – and then renew the contracts for those customers," says Waid. "We get a lot of bang for the buck with this one since there isn't a lot of hard selling required."

Sending Data to the Field

Verizon can use the automatic notification capabilities of WebFOCUS ReportCaster to schedule event-driven reports that are delivered when certain conditions are met, such as when a contract is close to expiration. ReportCaster distributes reports in virtually any format – even to wireless devices – ensuring that sales reps are notified of important dates and activities.

Steele is currently creating a managed reporting environment to improve ad hoc reporting capabilities by offering different views for different users, depending on the users' function in the business. He is also investigating the possibility of using WebFOCUS Two-Way Email to deliver real-time information to managers carrying personal digital assistants (PDAs) and other wireless devices. "Our sales managers are constantly out of the office, yet they need to be able to stay in touch with the activities in their regions," explains Steele. "With this mobile reporting infrastructure, they could request a current list of prospects simply by filling out a template on their PDAs. WebFOCUS would generate the report and send back the relevant data."

WebFOCUS Two-Way Email simplifies communication between people and systems not only by pushing critical information to users, but also by allowing them to pull data from enterprise systems via e-mail. It includes a prebuilt security structure to manage user authorizations, giving Steele the ability to control access to sensitive content. He is also interested in using Two-Way Email to supply technical information to sales engineers. For example, during an installation at a client site, an engineer could request data about hub information for a particular circuit ID. "WebFOCUS Two-Way Email could be used to deliver the requested information to the engineer's PDA," Steele says. "We're currently creating a database to hold the relevant information, and developing the report procedures using WebFOCUS MRE."

No More Busy Signals

Waid says being able to deliver information to a variety of devices in a multitude of formats raises the comfort level of new users. For example, reports can be presented in an Excel spreadsheet, sent as e-mail attachments, or posted on the Web. "WebFOCUS allows people to use the tools they are familiar with," he says. "They use a Web browser to interface with the data and they can generate output to a PDF file or spreadsheet, so there is very little learning curve."

In short, Verizon ISP Markets now has a better view into the workings of its business. "WebFOCUS can tell us which customer accounts bring us the most revenue, who the top sales reps are, and which of last month's forecasts actually closed this month," says Waid. "It shows us a lot about the market and about the behavior of our sales staff."

Scanlon concurs. "This is the first time we have had a comprehensive reporting system that allows sales personnel to see how information systems can impact their jobs on a day-to-day basis," she concludes. "They are approaching sales opportunities in new and productive ways. Now that they have seen what is possible, they are suggesting other types of reports that could be useful as well. The entire organization is more efficient."