Source:1 to 1 Magazine Date: April 2005

The 2005 Customer Champions is the second annual compendium of these executives: managers who are the voice of the customer within their companies. They are innovative, tenacious, creative leaders, who have an unrelenting focus on aligning their organizations' efforts with their customers' needs. Whether it's leading a total reorganization of a huge company around customers instead of products, or encouraging salespeople to know their customers better than the competition, or taking on an entire industry's problems in the interest of improving the customer experience, these executives have met their business problems head on and are building their greatest assets: their customers. Read on to meet this year's 10 Customer Champions and to see the benefits their companies have garnered as a result of their efforts. (The Champion entries are listed alphabetically by company name.)

Jon Voskuil, Amway

"We wanted to create an attitude of greater customer focus with distributors," Voskuil explains about the CRM-type program initiated in 2001. What he got was a worldwide task to facilitate customer strategies for Amway's top markets. Amway oversees affiliate offices in 55 countries and has more than 3 million business-owner customers.

Instead of forcing a decree from corporate down through the ranks, Voskuil's job when bringing the customer initiative to a market is one of high-level support, offering resources and advice on strategies and best practices—guiding affiliates, but letting them create programs that are best for their specific customers. "We assess and create a plan to help affiliates develop customer-focused activities," he says. This includes campaign management, data integration, contact center improvements, and sales force automation, all backed with a relationship management strategy that focuses on customer loyalty. The first initiative began in South Korea, and has expanded to Japan, Taiwan, Australia, and New Zealand, with plans to enter Europe and China in the near future.

Voskuil's unique position allows him to keep the global consistency of the programs while giving the affiliates autonomy to make decisions. To share that insight, he conducts group meetings with each office's relationship managers twice a year to share their best practices and challenges. "It gives people a chance to see what other offices are doing," he says.

In the Korean office, for instance, a small group of employees developed a customer-focused program with technology vendor Onyx to integrate its sales team, contact center, marketing department, and external Web site. The CRM project moved along quickly but spawned jealousy from some individuals who were not involved.

So when the next relationship management project started in Japan, Voskuil suggested working with a larger cross-functional team to include more viewpoints. That resulted in comprehensive development but a slow roll-out.

Back at headquarters, Voskuil's goal is to stay visible and keep customer momentum moving forward. Luckily, "we've had a lot of exposure at the corporate strategy level," he says. He recently began a formal program about relationship management initiatives, identifying about a dozen key influencers at corporate headquarters.

One-on-one meetings with these key stakeholders work best, because you can make the case relevant to them, Voskuil explains. "We spend a lot of time trying to keep it simple," he adds. That means a one-page slide and 20-minute presentation about the benefits of customer-focused initiatives. "We have to discipline ourselves to simplify it for the executive board," he adds. Ultimately, he says, it all comes down to numbers when communicating with the executive team. It's his role to manage and measure how the programs are going, and deliver the news to the corporate board. "I'm able to maintain a global ROI," he says, adding that more than $200 million worth of sales can be linked to relationship management improvements since 2001. For the future, Voskuil's looking to expand the program to more parts of the organization. "At first the program was very sales-growth focused, but now it much more reflects the desire for improved customer lifecycle management, elevating retention and loyalty as equal to sales," he says. The goal is to expand it into R&D, product development, and other places where customer focus hasn't played a big role. "This is definitely a corporatewide strategy," he says.

BT Global Services -- Danny Garvey
For Danny Garvey, May 2001 was a turning point. BT Global Services (a division of BT Group) where he had been employed for 30 years, was in a rut. Its glory days of runaway growth during the late 1990s had evaporated into a morass of runaway expenses, lowering profits, and a shrinking customer base. BT had 40 operating companies under its belt, and was acquiring small start-ups in the U.K. and Europe, but something was wrong.

"Then one day, I had an epiphany," he says. "We had lost sight of the customers. We were so wrapped up in acquiring firms and spreading ourselves thinly across the world that we had forgotten our customers. And without those, you don't have a business." Since that moment Garvey has been totally focused on customers. He was a driving force behind reorganizing BT in 2002 to get all of its brands and operating companies under one umbrella. He insisted that the sales teams within the enterprise division reengage with their customers and find out not how many phones they could order and revenue they could book, but what business issues they were dealing with.

Garvey has pushed BT so far away from a product focus that he is on the cusp of doing what many other companies would envy: Beginning this spring he is reorganizing BT Global Services' 20,000 employees around customer groups. If, for example, a manager was director of sales for the BT networking group in March, come April it's quite likely that she will be assigned to be sales director for the pharmaceutical group, or the auto group, or the IT group. This change is part of Garvey's overall strategy to ensure that BT has a clear business focus and that BT's customers are clear about how their telecom provider is serving them. "We have to prove that we can deliver a complete customer experience," he says. "We're different because we come from a networking background. That works to our advantage because we are headed toward a digitally networked global economy. Our technology will enable that and we're applying our skills on a global basis."

This doesn't mean that BT wants to be all things to all people. In 2002 Garvey pushed his sales force to identify the company's 10 best customers. These were the customers that were cooperative, profitable, and growable. Then he challenged them to find 500 global customers that BT didn't yet do business with that could potentially be as valuable as the 10 best. They identified those 500. In 2004 the company signed 68 of them. Some of them represent BT's initial expansion into the U.S. market. Garvey wants to sign at least 150 more of his most valuable customers over the next three years.

Despite static gross revenue, profit at BT has grown from $132 million in the fourth quarter of 2003 to $503 million in the fourth quarter of 2004. But equally important, Garvey points to a recent interaction with an employee as evidence that a customer-centric approach is working at BT. "I was having a meeting last week with a manager of our conferencing services division," he says. "And I asked him flat out, 'How's it going?' He told me that his job used to consist of selling products and product lines. Because of that, he was tasked with several things to do when he visited a client. He was a trouble shooter. But now that he's engaging the client and solving business problems instead of just selling, he's driving the process. The client doesn't tell him what to do anymore. Now he has a "to-do" list for them.

Herbalife -- Michele Crocker, Vice President of Distributor Services, North America
Change usually breeds resistance. But Herbalife's Michele Crocker was able to avoid such conflicts when she instituted 22 process changes in the company's U.S. contact center two years ago.

How was that possible? Crocker developed a culture of open communication among employees and fostered a learning environment. She also made her customer service reps feel valued and explained the urgency of the process improvements so they wouldn't fear the changes. Finally, she instituted an awards and recognition program. "You've got to be rewarding, fun, and treat your job as more than just a job," says Crocker, Herbalife's vice president, distributor services, North America. "If you tap that into your employees, you will unleash a level of service never seen before."

Crocker worked 18 years in the customer service environment at British Airways, UPS, and DHL, before the global herbal remedy empire whisked her away from its London operation three years ago to turn around the slumping U.S. operations. Crocker's fresh blend of enthusiasm, fine-tuned customer focus, chiseled leadership, and most important, her ability to strategize outside the normal realm of contact center operations invigorated the organization with a new approach to managing customer relationships: Keep shareholders and employees happy and the customers—Herbalife's independent distributors—will be happy.

The transformation involved reengineering processes and establishing new industry-standard service benchmarks. The underlying impediment for Crocker was that Herbalife's call center didn't yet think like a call center. There were no processes that involved monitoring, training, or measuring. So she did what anyone in her situation would do—she talked to other contact centers to see how they operated. Next she set goals: to be the best company to work for, to care for the customers and distributors, and to invest money in Herbalife employees.

Once those objectives were in place she instituted 22 process changes to improve customer support and service. These changes ranged from adding call monitoring to developing new agent training. Additionally, each supervisor underwent 90 hours of formal training. (Last year Herbalife spent $100,000 on contact center training.) She also institutionalized best practices and guided the call center through a rigorous benchmarking audit.

Now her agents pay special attention to personalization on calls and are trained to make every distributor feel like he's the very first person the agent spoke to that day. "The whole point of being in a business is to support your customers. It's so important to take care of them and recognize their lifetime value," she says. "It takes so long to gain customers and so quick to lose them. It's important to differentiate yourself from the competition."

Herbalife has improved employee retention,lowered costs, reduced the number of errors, and improved first-contact resolution by 91 percent. As a result it saved more than $1 million last year. "At the end of the day you can have the best plan, you can have the best technology, but endeavors succeed or fail because of the people," Crocker says. "We put a priority on people because we believe there's a direct correlation between people, service quality, and shareholder value."

MGM Mirage -- Carolyn Leveque, Director of Loyalty Marketing
If you're feeling that your company's corporatewide customer management initiative seems impossible to complete, imagine this: the successful integration of 16 operating systems, 16 databases, 16 marketing systems, 17 branded loyalty programs, 16 customer valuation models, multiple legacy systems over seven properties, the training of 8,000 employees, the conversion of 80 million customer records, and the consolidation of everything into a single model with one single vision.

Carolyn Leveque calls it a "massive undertaking."

Leveque is director of loyalty marketing for MGM Mirage's 11 resorts in Michigan, Mississippi, and Nevada, including the Bellagio, Treasure Island, and Primm Valley Resorts. Since 2001 she has stayed focused on the enterprise-wide initiative, merging the customer records and business processes of MGM Mirage with MGM Grand Resorts. She often jokes about integration, saying support groups should exist for people involved in corporate loyalty initiatives. However, her motivation through it all remained constant: The commitment to enterprise-wide customer access and valued choices would pay off in greater share-of-wallet.

The Player's Club, one of several new loyalty programs operating throughout the enterprise, is the pulse of this integrated initiative. The essence of the program is its versatility, transparency, and cross-property redemptions and rewards. It distinguishes itself from other casino loyalty programs in that it enables visitors to play in any of the resorts and redeem their rewards everywhere. It operates on a single enterprise platform powered by IGT, an integrated casino management system. The system tracks the players wherever they go, recognizes them throughout every resort, records their behavior in real time, and then sends the recording to a single data warehouse. "It gives us the ability to build more meaningful relationships with customers over time. We're not a one-size-fits-all company. We have different brands and attractions, but one thing we share in common is the customer," she says.

Leveque admits that she isn't the visionary behind this wide-scale customer loyalty endeavor. Steven Moore, vice president, loyalty marketing, is the inventor. She, however, serves as the engine, driving her team of 20 people from partnership marketing, reporting and analytics, corporate event execution, and training, to account managers who assist with operational implementation, as well as communications managers. She continually strives to ensure that the corporate programs comply with the brands and says that she remains challenged to develop new initiatives and improve upon what's already in place, from reengineering the Web site to developing new performance reporting metrics. "I believe that good ideas are cheap," she says. "Getting them done is the hard part. The value is in the execution."

The secret sauce, which she says isn't really a secret, is "know your customer, collect the data, use it responsibly, and add value." If it's not a secret, then why don't companies conduct their loyalty initiatives equally as well? Leveque says success stems from commitment and taking a thoughtful approach to ROI—qualities that her company showed when it made the $50 million investment in the infrastructure to enable the integration.

Since then, the investment has improved database marketability by 85 percent and increased cross-property play by 129 percent the first year. "Our customers know us as a single company," she says. "We wanted to be sophisticated enough to know our customers individually."

Microsoft -- Steve Shiadeh, General Manager of Microsoft Healthcare and Life Sciences
For the past 25 years, Steve Shihadeh has devoted his business life in some way to connecting customers and pharmaceutical companies. For much of that time he ran the pharmaceutical division of Siemens. For the past two years he has been the driving force behind Microsoft's pharmaceutical business initiatives, and now he finds himself leading the most ambitious effort the company has ever made in a business vertical.

At a time when the pharmaceutical industry is challenged with product recalls and charges of deceptive clinical trial and price gouging, Shihadeh will lead a new digital pharma initiative created to help Microsoft's pharma clients reconnect with their two main customers: patients and physicians. "This is all about getting close to the customer," says Shihadeh, general manager, Microsoft Healthcare and Life Sciences. "We have spent lots of time before we announced this initiative getting as close as we can to the pharmaceutical customers, and we must understand that the end user customer is as important as the physician. In my experience pharmaceutical companies [also] want quality time with physicians and we're going to try to make the most of that as well."

Shihadeh's goals in running the digitial pharma initiative are extremely specific and ambitious, and focus on serving his customers by helping them better serve theirs. One is to transform the pharmaceutical business into one where "consumers will assert more control over financial and care decisions…and the performance and accountability of pharmaceutical care will become increasingly transparent to all constituents."

These are lofty goals. But Shihadeh believes he can orchestrate Microsoft's resources to make an impact in the pressure-filled pharmaceutical space. His group will offer customers "speed to insight" using Microsoft Tablet PC technology and various software packages to help those customers connect disparate resources and data more effectively, and therefore drive faster customer insights. So, for example, the sales rep who needs to pitch clinical trials to a group of physicians in Minneapolis can immediately access the reactions from a similar meeting held earlier in the day in New York. The consumer who wants information on a painkiller he was just prescribed will be able to access a Web site with specific clinical trial data.

Shihadeh's next imperative is "value for cost." Shihadeh will coordinate Microsoft and its partners' effort to develop solutions designed to enable pharma companies to quickly evaluate the ROI on promotional and marketing activities. This, he hopes, will result in better targeted information for patients and less wasted money on inefficient ad campaigns. "For example, if the industry gets into a crisis situation as it did with Vioxx and Celebrex recently, we want to enable technology that will get an information package out to pharmacists and physicians almost immediately," Shihadeh says. "That's being customer-centric. One of the big [goals of] this initiative is making all parties involved in this business much more agile."

QuickBooks Online Edition -- Paul Rosenfeld, General Manager
Somewhere in a server room, a computer engineer watches lines of code scroll across a screen, knowing exactly what it represents. For the average person, it's an endless series of ones and zeroes, but to the engineer, it's insight into a customer's experience.

If this were The Matrix, Paul Rosenfeld would be Neo, on a quest to improve the lives of the people on the other end of the computer code. Rosenfeld, general manager of QuickBooks Online, is on a mission—not to save the world, but to enhance customer relationships. Rosenfeld runs the online division of Intuit's QuickBooks accounting software. He's been in the position for 18 months, and from the beginning has encouraged employees to make personal connections with customers. After all, the firm's small-business customers are not accounting professionals and need to have someone they can trust to help them. "We have a phenomenal culture that's passionate about the customer," Rosenfeld says.

According to Rosenfeld, the firm has internalized the philosophy that satisfying customers is everyone's job. For example, a benefit of being an online service is that "we know exactly what our customers are doing," on both an aggregate and individual level, Rosenfeld says. He requires engineers literally to watch transactions as they happen, Matrix-style, by reading lines of code in real time. The reason, he says, is to stay on top of any problems or customer experience issues. In addition, Rosenfeld encourages all 100 employees at monthly "All Hands" meetings to share customer issues. He also invites employees to listen to contact center calls every few weeks to gain the customers' perspective so that they understand their frustrations.

Rosenfeld refers to the contact center, which handles phones calls and emails, as the Customer Delight Center. When a customer sends an email to the company explaining a problem, for example, a contact center agent responds with a phone call within 30 minutes. That way the customer has an actual person on the phone to help resolve the issue. Rosenfeld doesn't measure average handle time. He wants agents to do their best to solve customers' problems. "We want our employees to do what it takes to get the job done," he says.

After every support call, customers are asked to take a customer satisfaction survey; 50 percent actually do. More than half a contact center agent's compensation is based on those answers. "You will not make it in our company unless you wow our customers," he says, adding that a majority of the respondents say they are impressed with the level of human interaction.

Rosenfeld believes that in addition to customer service transparency helps build loyalty. The company learns as much as it can from customers, so Rosenfeld wants customers to have an opportunity to learn about the company. That way, transparency is a two-way street.

A few months ago the firm started a Webblog where Rosenfeld and other employees discuss their daily challenges. "It's a way for employees to connect with customers and for customers to get to know us," he says. The company added a message board recently so customers can add to the conversations.

Rosenfeld is proud that the customer base has at least doubled every year since QuickBooks began online operations in 2000. With 35,000 customers today, that's pretty impressive growth. But, he says, he's most proud that customers recommend the service an average of 3.2 times per year. Rosenfeld's secret? "It's really not rocket science," he explains. "You just have to listen to [customers]."

Saab -- Patrick Riese, CRM Director
Before embarking on any client-focused business initiative, Patrick Riese imagines himself in his customers' shoes. He asks, "How does the customer benefit from this?" In doing so, Riese evolved into somewhat of a data czar. His efforts will ensure that Saab continues selling to customers who are known as the most loyal in the industry.

Riese, who joined Saab right out of business school 14 years ago, worked his way to CRM director in 1999. At that time the company only dabbled in advertising. The brand image remained intact, but it failed to make the same impact as in years before—Saab didn't have the marketing power to cut through the clutter. Riese knew he had to take the necessary step of assembling the infrastructure to fuel marketing and to design effective communication programs.

Fortunately, Riese had the benefit of some existing technology to support his efforts. In 2002 Saab had implemented a Siebel Systems enterprise CRM solution, which also powered the dealers' lead management system and customer interaction center. Then last year Saab rolled out Siebel's Automotive Marketing strategy to eight markets—seven in Europe and one in the United States. Before the rollouts of both the enterprise and marketing solutions, Riese ensured the quality of the data, consolidating it in one place and using FirstLogic to cleanse the data—it's the first time in Saab's history that it operated with a consolidated database. He says the data integrity initiative has made the biggest impact on the success of the customer strategy.

Riese also developed 27 customer clusters, and from those segmentations, his team ranks customers from low- to high-value and communicates with them accordingly—low-value customers receive email newsletters, while high-value clients receive elaborate direct mail packages complete with gifts. Now he's developing different loyalty communications for each channel. "You can have all the infrastructure you want, but if you don't have content, it's just a lot of expensive hardware," he says.

The practice works. The company saw a 5 percent reduction in overall marketing costs, and an increase in customer satisfaction rates, from 67 percent to 75 percent. And although he can't quantitate the increases, Riese says that the company also improved the overall effectiveness of prospecting campaigns. Next, Riese would like to pursue integrating data from Saab's 240 U.S. dealers, and with parent company General Motors' 8,000 dealers. Riese says that there's no magic sauce or recipe; success relies on proper use of data. "Never underestimate the efforts that go into data execution," he says. "If you have bad data, everything stops in its tracks."

Schneider Electric -- Chris Curtis, Vice President of Electrical Distribution
If Chris Curtis had to list the ingredients of a successful enterprise, he would say the recipe consists of 40 percent people, 40 percent process, and 20 percent technology. Curtis, Schneider Electric's vice president of electrical distribution, kept that philosophy of "people and process first" intact when he built the company's sales performance selling model, CASH (consulting, adapting, selling, and helping), from the ground up.

After more than a year of market decline, in 2002 Schneider brought in Curtis. Six months into his new role Curtis asked himself, "Are we achieving functional productivity?" The answer was no. Rather than simply lowering costs, a practice commonly done in the past, Curtis wanted to raise performance expectations and the overall business standards. To do so he launched the CASH model.

In the first step of launching the new strategy, Curtis and his core team of people from sales, channel management, customer operations, and the back office, as well as a dedicated process improvement team, conducted an analytical review of the market. During the second step, the team planned a development strategy to gain an understanding of available resource allocation and channel distribution. "We asked, 'what does it really take to implement a strategy?'" he says. The third part consisted of a robust analysis around employees, including competency modeling where the team defined levels of competency per position, training tactics, and the overall expectation of the employees.

A "deep dive" followed next, where area management teams from the 32 areas representing the company's 110 U.S. offices visited Schneider Electric's North American headquarters to help conduct an analysis of the plan and build development for the new vision.

But with new processes come change. Curtis ensured such changes were governed by training for each office. In fact, the very first day that an office was thrust into CASH, employees there attended a change management program. "The reality is that [our business] is 90 percent about the people and being sensitive about finding out what people go through when you ask them to do something different tomorrow than they're doing today," he says. "It's a huge leadership challenge. It's one of the things I do up front."

Although Curtis is an engaged leader, he recognizes that managers are in fact the catalyst of change—not corporate headquarters. Therefore his team coaches them and provides the skills about how to train their staffs. He also visits each area manager monthly to monitor the success of the business model in that area. "By spending time with him, with his team and his customers, I know personally that I can validate how they and their teams receive this information," he says.

His method is paying off. From June 2003 to June 2004 Schneider has seen a 23 percent improvement in sales-to-cost ratio; sales per outside sales engineer increased by 22.7 percent; and customer-facing time jumped 12 percent. The company now is in the midst of a process design to deploy an SAP rollout to offices in its 130 global areas—a three- to four-year undertaking. Curtis says that if he had to do it over, he would spend even more time educating and training the customer-facing managers and identifying their competencies. "Never underestimate the influence of your front-line people."

Spunlogic -- Jeff Hilimire, CEO
CEOs today are often derided for focusing on building profit at the expense of the customer, but Jeff Hilimire's focus is set squarely on building profit for his customers.

As CEO of interactive advertising agency Spunlogic, Hilimire is not about squeezing the most advertising dollars from clients so the agency can reap the most possible commission. Instead, he and his firm are working to help its online advertiser customers, from Anheuser-Busch to Porsche to Georgia-Pacific, connect more profitably to their customers. "What I would really like companies to understand is the difference between the in-store customer and the online customer," he says. "It is a very important difference, and if you understand it you can realize the competitive advantages of data capture and increased customer retention. When a customer is shopping off-line they may be miles from the nearest competitor. When they're online, they're a click away."

As an example of how critical customer behavior can be, Hilimire points to work Spunlogic recently did for a local Atlanta car dealer. The dealer came to Spunlogic with ideas about running an email campaign to customers who contacted the dealer through its Web site. The campaign, according to the client, needed to encourage the customer to select colors and options for a particular car, because the dealer believed online customers had already gone far down the line in product research and were ready to buy. In-store customers were browsers.

Spunlogic's research (done through email, phone surveys, and results from previous work) found different results. Online customers had done research, but they were nowhere near picking colors and options for a car. Spunlogic found the online customers were close to picking the type of car they would purchase (minivan, SUV, sedan), but needed an in-store visit to get to the next level of specificity. Spunlogic's recommended campaign of appealing to a dealer visit led to a much higher conversion rate than the dealer expected.

"What is the customer's intention and how can Internet marketing reshape that intention?" Hilimire asks. "We come up with customer-centric tactics to do that."

According to Hilimire, the next level of customer-centric Internet marketing is greater integration, and he plans to help his customers understand and capitalize on the benefits of that integration. "A year from now I would like us to talk about how all channels of a company's marketing activities tie together," he says. "Let's talk about how we can entice and track a customer's behavior as they go from seeing a TV ad to viewing a Web site to attending an event and then back again. The Internet can lead to a holistic view of a company's relationship to the customer."

Verizon -- Veronica Pellizzi, Senior Vice President Sales of Enterprise Group
Veronica pellizzi has a huge stake in her clients' success. They are, after all, the top 10,000 companies that Verizon deals with. She also has a huge stake in communicating her customer-centric attitude to her salespeople, and she would do anything to drive that home. That "anything" includes driving a motorcycle into a national sales meeting.

"It was last year and the theme for our meeting was 'break away from the pack,'" she says. "So I, as the leader of the pack, became a motorcycle chick and drove into the sales meeting. If you're going to lead people it's good for them to see you taking risks and having fun like that."

As senior vice president of sales for Verizon's $7 billion-plus enterprise group, demonstrating to her reps how they can break away from the pack by focusing on customers is an integral part of Pellizzi's retention strategy. In fact, her customer-first approach is helping Verizon win market share from companies like Nextel, Sprint, Qwest, and Cingular.

At the heart of Pellizzi's approach is customer-centric selling. So she continuously instills into her 3,000-member sales force that knowledge is king. Know your own products and know your company's strengths. More important, know what your accounts are trying to achieve with telecom services. What are their pain points? How can Verizon help their business? Each customer interaction can serve to fill that knowledge bank, according to Pellizzi, so she insists that salespeople continually build their knowledge about clients through Internet searches and the business press.

"For me it's not about pushing products," she says. "We always focus on exceeding a customer's expectations. That's the best way to retain customers. Your customer-facing personnel are the most important customer differentiators."

Exceeding expectations can also be as simple as following up on an information request. Pellizzi is a stickler for follow-up. To her, every time a customer requests information it's a chance to build credibility. Anytime salespeople don't follow up on a client request, it suggests that they're taking that customer for granted. "We need to think about how we approach customers," she says. "Ten years ago this business was growing at a rapid rate. Every year represented a bigger pie. Now we're all competing for the same pie. We need to maintain our market share and grow market share within every account. If we continue to be aggressive and customer-focused we will be the best-in-class solution."

The efforts of Pellizzi's team have paid off. The company's broadband business services earned top scores in the most recent J.D. Power and Associates 2004 Major Provider Business Telecommunications Services Study. According to J.D. Power, Verizon scored highest in sales team performance, billing, image, offerings and promotions, and cost of service. Pellizzi says her customer-first attitude was ingrained early in her career. Prior to her current position, she was group president, Internet and data services, for the Advanced Services Group, responsible for leading the sales, marketing, and customer service strategy for Verizon's broadband and Internet services business. Under her leadership the company's DSL customer base grew 122 percent to 1.2 million subscribers, establishing Verizon as the second largest DSL provider in the nation. Prior to the Bell Atlantic/GTE merger, Pellizzi was president and CEO of Bell Atlantic Long Distance Business Services, where she was responsible for leading the company's entry into the business long distance market. At all of these jobs, her number-one priority was the customer.

"It's always about the customer," she says. "Even when I was an account manager I had the attitude that the customer is going to like me and trust me and I was going to serve them so well that they would want to give me their business."