NASHVILLE--On the heels of its fourth consecutive customer service award from Atlantic ACM, Qwest Wholesale Markets is preparing to move things up a notch, according to its leadership.

“In 2008, we are moving to a little different level,” said Roland Thornton, executive vice president of wholesale markets for Qwest. “We have retooled our sales force to focus on selling more complex data products, because that’s where the growth is. And we are working to reduce our provisioning cycle to provision those services faster than anyone else in that space.”

Qwest has brought on a new vice president of operations for its wholesale unit – telecom veteran Warren Mickens – and he will be charged with delivering that faster provisioning cycle, Mickens previously worked at Alcatel-Lucent, where he ran the Telecom New Zealand network, and at SBC Communications, where among other things he helped clean up problems at Ameritech. “This is the firt time I’ve been called in when the house is not on fire,” he joked in a Comptel interview.

In addition, Qwest has added a program manager’s office and a customer solutions center intended to focus more tightly on solving wholesale customers’ problems and proactively offering ideas as to how to do business better, Thornton said.

“We don’t have all the technology in place – we are enhancing our internal systems as much as possible,” he said. “Last year, we changed out our inventory OSS system, ,and we lost some efficiency and speed when we did this. This year, we are starting fresh with a new inventory system, so we want to look at our provisioning and ordering systems that hang off of that inventory system. We will have even greater expectations.”