ACC Value Challenge Resource Library

value proposition and notch up quick wins, he ensured positive adoption within the company. The team made presentations that explained why the legal department was conducting the project and what changes to expect.

The team also reviewed the terms with customers. “Feedback from customers indicates that the new terms and conditions feel more like technology-company terms and less like those of a legacy telecommunications company. This was a major win for the legal department,” Veilleux says.

That success helped the team get buy-in for the Global Master Terms transformation project, which took over a year and represented “a magnitude of difference,” Veilleux says. Verizon Enterprise Solutions operates in more than

70 countries around the world and must be compliant with a dizzying number of local legal and regulatory requirements. Nine different master contracts had been generated by the divergent, and somewhat fragmented, regions.

Far from being overwhelmed by the project,
They coordinated with
attorneys on five continents
representing all those countries,
collaborating via two-hour
conference calls, twice a week,
for more than a year. Again, a
data-driven approach informed
the process, as the team used
data from the International
Association for Contract and
Commercial Management to
learn what terms are most
likely to contribute to contract
disputes. They also reached out to the litiga-
tion department to talk about risk from a
shareholder perspective.

The company will soon roll out a single, eight-page global contract that works across all Verizon services, for all customers, in all geographies. Its new master service agreement framework features a contract with a simple narrative structure:

• Here’s what we offer and how we offer it

• Here’s how you can buy it and for how long

• Here are our collective remedies for non-performance

• Here are our core legal terms.

“Previously, contracts were a melting pot of ideas,” Jones says. For the transformation, they took a different tack: Be Your Customer. “Understanding why customers were coming to Verizon creates a better narrative and a different emotional experience for the customer.”