Verizon technician Joe Jones talks on a cell phone as he prepares to troubleshoot a digital subscriber line in St. Petersburg. The phone company has equipped its technicians with laptop computers, cell phones, map software and other gear to make service calls more efficient.
A clock starts ticking for Verizon and service technician Joe Jones as soon as a call comes in from a customer whose home phone won't work or a potential customer who wants to get wired.
People expect speedy service, and under state Public Service Commission guidelines Verizon has 24 hours to get a phone back in service and three days to do an installation.
Meeting those deadlines has not always been easy, and Jones knows customers can be on edge when they lose contact with the outside world. The 14-year veteran of the phone company remembers the days when it could take a half-hour or more just for him to get a work order.
Sometimes he would have to drive back to a central office just to pick up the paperwork for his next assignment. Sometimes he would have to wade through paper maps and blueprints to find a customer's house or locate the boxes that served a particular area.
But now, getting the next order is down to about two minutes because the Tampa Bay area's dominant phone company has brought its troubleshooting system up to technological speed. Verizon has pumped millions of dollars into its Automated Work Assignment System and equipped Jones and hundreds of other technicians with laptop computers, cell phones, map software and other gear to make the system more efficient.
"We can get the right job to the right tech closest" to it, said Alex Hunter, Verizon's manager of operations.
Verizon began using its Automated Work Assignment System in 1989, but it initially required techs in the field to use two-way radios or phones to talk to dispatchers. Last year, it made the system part of its internal Web site.
Those changes have produced results that have Verizon officials boasting: It repaired 95.6 percent of out-of-service lines within 24 hours, just above the state's 95 percent guideline, and completed 95.3 percent of installations within three days, above the state's 90 percent guideline.
Put another way, from 2001 to this year, it cut the time to handle jobs by 30 to 45 minutes each. It increased the number of repair jobs the average technician handled by half a job a day, to an average of 3.6, and new service orders by almost three-quarters of a job a day, to an average of 3.2.
That's far better than some of the grades the company earned from the PSC in the mid 1990s. In 1997, for example, the company then known as GTE received a 76.2 percent rating, just above the passing mark of 75. And in 1996, it earned a paltry 31.9 percent.
"When your plant is outdoors and exposed to the weather, you're just going to have issues from time to time," spokesman Bob Elek said.
Jones arrived at work recently at Verizon's facility on 49th Street South in St. Petersburg. He turned on his laptop, used his cell phone as a modem to connect to the company network and got a work order for a customer having problem with a digital subscriber line Internet connection in the Old Northeast neighborhood.
At the customer's house, he checked the lines outside, using equipment that hasn't changed much in years. Once he determined the problem was inside the house, though, he needed a new work order.
All he had to do was go back on his computer, connect to the office and get the order. It took only minutes, and he was inside working on the line.
The bay area is ahead of some other regions, where the techs don't yet carry cell phones, according to Dan Carbone, director of the remote operations staff.
The company is considering the newer, faster 3G (third generation) cell phones for data transmission, but it has to consider factors just as its customers do:
"We're unsure how much it's going to cost," Carbone said, and whether the additional speed would be worth it.
Even the phone company has to look at its budget.
- Information from Times files was used in this report. Dave Gussow can be reached at gussow@sptimes.com or (727) 445-4228.
