Big Data & Insights: Oil for the Digital Age

The examples illustrated here are all built on the premise that we could leverage the power of data and find better and more efficient ways to take care of our customer’s unmet and unrequested needs.

Can We Prevent Issues Before they Occur?

“If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” The winter of 2014 brought record snowfall in much of the Northeast, toppling trees onto overhead phone lines. It’s important to note that sometimes a phone line doesn’t snap right away. Instead, a tree may stay precariously waiting for a final gust of wind or bit of ice before taking down the phone line. As the fallen tree sits pressing on the phone lines, data transmission is impacted. Indicators, such as optical power, jitter, delay and latency, show abnormal values during the ‘tree event’. Our real-time analytics engine correlates these data streams with normal day patterns to predict a developing situation and proactively alert operations, who can then address the situation before customers experience an outage.

Can We Help Our Customers Solve their Own Issues?

One of our large enterprise banking customers was able to solve a problem even before it happened. The analytics streams detected abnormal data patterns coming from the customer’s equipment. The anomalous behavior served as a red flag, signaling a need for the customer to change a configuration parameter. Verizon contacted the customer and the timely change prevented a large-scale disruption of the bank’s voice communication service.

Can We Better Serve Our Customers in the Field?

Long gone are the days when customers will accept all day appointment windows. But, how can we shorten the window down to one hour and guarantee never to miss it? The complexity wastamed by correlating information about a field technician’s work location, customer’s job status, job priority, and historical completion trends, and thus predicting an accurate one-hour technician arrival window on the morning of the customer’s appointment.

As digital becomes the new normal and the explosion of connected technology continues, dependence on data science and algorithmic prediction will increase. At Verizon, we have already taken leaps to transform the business model from ‘data as advisory’ to ‘data as actionable’and are now approaching“data as actionable in real-time.” Nearly every industry is in the midst of disruptive change and we at Verizon are excited to not only be enabling this digital disruption but also carrying the torch to lead through this change.

For every case study we explore and enable, there are hundreds more waiting. For every segment of data collated, there are new devices coming online daily with even more insights to share. Every day we’re excited about the new possibilities of leveraging the power of Big Data to tackle the most complex challenges.

Verizon delivers innovative communications and technology solutions that improve the way customers live, work and play.