Qwest – “The telecommunications industry enjoys a low bar of customer service compared with other industries.”

Pros

Qwest is a great place to get solid telecommunications experience, especially good foundation knowledge of a classic RBOC (Regional Bell Operating Company) operations and practices. The company has opportunities across a great diversity of business units -- particularly with the 2001 merger of the "old Qwest" long-distance company with the traditional phone company U S West, forming the current Qwest we know today.

The employees and management team are generally down-to-earth and, with few exceptions, are easy to work with.

Cons

Perhaps like other U.S. phone companies, the corporate culture is traditional, and still operates on a business model of guaranteed revenue growth as a public utility and monopoly along with the speculative assumption its business will grow at a 1:1 ratio with population growth.

However, the emergence of non-traditional communications technology such as Wireless phones, Voice over IP (VoIP), competition from cable companies, and FCC mandates forcing Qwest and other telcos to share their network facilities with competitive local exchange carriers has greatly undermined the traditional telco business model of assumed growth.

Never having to worry about workforce reductions, these competitive pressures have brutally forced the corporate management to examine its operations and decide which areas of the business are critical and which areas could be consolidated with other areas. Such decisions have not always been correct, or even graceful in their execution as much of the management, itself, is so deeply rooted into the traditional business.

Many telephone carriers in other parts of the country, despite the same competitive pressures, enjoy a much larger cushion of guaranteed revenue due to sheer population density. For example, Verizon, which is the predominant carrier of the East Coast, has tens of millions more subscribers in a much smaller geographic territory than Qwest, making its operations far more efficient and profitable.

This has forced Qwest to trim many areas of its business to the detriment of maintaining service levels that are even consistent with those in previous years in an effort to even maintain its value. The company is also dogged by enormous debt, and in 2004 had to jettison several business units (including its phone directory business and wireless spectrum. Today it is seeking to divest its long-distance national network just to maintain viability in today's lean marketplace. The company's enormous debt load has made Qwest a very unattractive acquisition target, so the company--for better or worse--has been a non-player in the rapid consolidation of the industry during these past few years. If the trend of the company divesting its infrastructure continues, Qwest may some day be nothing more than a broker of third-party services (it already resells DirecTV and Verizon Wireless).

Qwest is quite bureaucratic which could frustrate a talented "high gear" individual seeking work with a sense of challenge, responsibility, and accountability for the satisfaction to customers. The overall service that is provided to customers is a diffused responsibility across dozens of departments, often making no single department solely accountable for the overall success or failure of delivering quality products and services to their customers. This diffusion of accountability comes across to the customer.

Advice to Senior Management

Employees should have a much greater sense of self-worth in the corporation. There is perhaps no better means to understand how efficiencies can be increased than by soliciting such suggestions from staff employees.

I also suggest that 2nd and 3rd level supervisors and managers spend 15% and 30% (respectively) of their job doing the exact same work of their reports. This would create much more cohesion of trust and understanding between the management and its staff, and would create a much more accountable and informed management team.