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Readiness support: North America handbook
Our goal is to be easy to do business with. Part of our commitment to you is to anticipate your needs and to efficiently provide straightforward, clear communication. Use this handbook to guide you through our customer success, sales, and support structure, no matter what solution your company uses.
Your account team
Across every step of service setup and delivery, we want you to access the most knowledgeable resources. Our Sales and Customer Success teams work in close partnership with you. Sales focuses on identifying strategic solutions that are a good fit for your technology roadmap, and the Customer Success team works to ensure the delivery of an exceptional customer experience. Learn more about our commitment to customer success.
Customer success (CS) professional
Your customer success professional is your primary point of contact and partners closely with you to understand your critical business objectives and help leverage Lumen solutions to achieve your goals. They take a strategic view into understanding your business needs, track the overall performance of solutions, and anticipate opportunities that can improve your business outcomes. They partner with you at key interaction points to ensure alignment and swift issue resolution, provide continued value through onboarding and post-activation meetings, first bill reviews, and quarterly success reviews. They also guide you on how to best leverage Lumen digital, self-service tools, such as Control Center, making it easier for you to activate, monitor, and manage your solutions.
Sales/account director (AD)
Sales focuses on providing you with the right counsel and identifying strategic solutions that align to your evolving technology roadmap by partnering closely with your customer success professional. They are responsible for gathering and confirming your requirements so they can submit your order. They will also work with you to execute all quotes and orders for additional Lumen services, as well as helping you through the credit-application process.
Sales engineer (SE)
Your sales engineer works with you to identify options and define technical requirements for implementing your services. They are responsible for understanding your existing network, key locations, and potential needs. Your sales engineer brings your business needs and technology challenges together with the Lumen range of services and capabilities for a technically sound and cost-effective solution. They also manage the engineering portion of your service quote as well as the inventory and capacity process for your new order.
Customer care manager (CCM)
Your CCM helps ensure your Lumen installation experience is a very positive one. Your CCM's name, phone number and email address appear on your order acknowledgement letter. Your CCM can help you with any inquiries you may have regarding your order, keep you informed of the status every step of the way from a holistic viewpoint, and will act as an advocate on your behalf. They are your contact throughout the lifecycle of your order and will manage your order from order submittal to customer acceptance, and they will communicate with you at key milestones and updates. If you have questions about your order, feel free to reach out to your CCM.
Additional account team roles
Based on your relationship with Lumen, you may have additional account team members:
- Client support manager (CSM): For wholesale, government, and education customers, your client support manager is responsible for your lifecycle management needs, including your first bill review and any billing concerns, point of contact for issues and escalating trouble tickets as needed, regular business reviews of your account and general account maintenance.
- Indirect partner: As a customer of our indirect channel, you may always work through your respective partner. Although you have direct access to our representatives, your partner may also act as a liaison between your business and Lumen.
- Channel manager (CM): Both your partner and channel manager provide information about Lumen services and serve as your overall points of contact for Lumen sales. Your channel manager gathers and confirms your requirements—elements necessary to submit an order. They also work with you to execute all quotes and orders for new and additional Lumen services and help you through the credit-application process.
- Partner experience manager (PEM): Your partner experience manager works with your partner to oversee all lifecycle needs for your account. As your account stewards, your partner and partner experience manager are your points of contact for escalations, service and business reviews, and all other aspects of your experience.
Service delivery
Lumen understands the service-delivery process can be complicated. We are committed to making it easy for you by communicating with you every step of the way and giving you the visibility, you need to manage your orders:
- Lumen partners with you to make sure we have all the correct information to prepare your order for accurate and timely delivery.
- Lumen validates the network resources necessary to meet your requirements and determines when we can complete your service.
- Lumen notifies you as your order progresses towards activation.
- Lumen provisions, configures, and tests our network to enable proper function and performance of your services.
- Depending on the type of product you ordered, you connect your equipment and activate your service or Lumen works with you to schedule a coordinated activation.
Customer care manager (CCM)
Your customer care manager monitors your order to help ensure progress is being made toward the delivery of your service, answers any questions about your order, keeps you informed of the status, and acts as an advocate on your behalf.
You can also check your order status online using Control Center.
Contact your customer care manager for any additional questions or for information on standard implementation intervals, order modification charges, and expedite fees.
Repair support
Lumen is dedicated to providing you with 24/7 support for all your installed services. We embrace a strong operational philosophy that is customer-focused and highly responsive. Strict performance metrics drive our internal organizations to deliver quality service to you on a consistent basis. In the event an issue arises with your service, Lumen works quickly to resolve any issues. We know time is critical when you are experiencing an outage or service impairment and we focus our technical expertise on restoring service as quickly as possible while keeping you informed of progress, so you can focus on managing your business.
Our technicians
Once your Lumen service has been installed, a technician will be your point of contact for service-related issues. Our technicians are trained to quickly address technical issues and will provide start-to-finish accountability. Your technician may initiate several tests and processes to determine the root cause of the issue and will either resolve the issue or collaborate with internal or external fix agents such as Lumen field technicians, other internal technicians or external vendors, to resolve the issue.
Opening and monitoring a repair ticket
Lumen makes it easy for you to interact with our repair team when you need them. You can reach a technician anytime, 24/7.
You can also create a repair ticket online using Control Center. You will receive a ticket number to track its progress.
Planned network maintenance
To maintain and grow the network, Lumen schedules maintenance. We try to plan with as little impact to you and with as much advanced notice as possible. Lumen sends you email notifications with:
- description of the work and why it must occur
- date and time of the scheduled maintenance
- list of the impacted services
- expected impact to the listed services
- location of the maintenance
- status of the maintenance
- contact information for questions
Learn how to view scheduled maintenance events in Control Center
Support contact information
Lumen uses a global change request (GCR) network maintenance number as the unique ID for maintenance events. For questions regarding a GCR, contact our Change Management team.
Billing support
Lumen provides a monthly invoice for all installed services. Always review your invoice to ensure its accuracy. If you have questions, we are here to help. Open a billing request for any inquiries, disputes, balance and payment information related to services on your Lumen invoice.
You can open a billing request by:
- Submitting a billing request online using Control Center
- Calling us directly or sending an email:
- Enterprise: 877-453-8353, option 2 or billing@lumen.com
- National Wholesale: 800-335-5672 or wholesale.dispute@lumen.com
- Enterprise: 877-453-8353, option 2 or billing@lumen.com
Our live billing support is available from 7:00am–7:00pm CT for Enterprise customers and from 8:00am–5:00pm CT for National Wholesale customers.
E-mails are acknowledged within 48 business hours.
If you don't have portal access, contact your Lumen representative.
For more information on how to resolve billing issues, download the billing assistance guide.
Partial month billing
If your bill only includes a partial month, charges are prorated based on the beginning or ending dates of the services.
Paperless billing
We’re committed to making it easy to do business with us and now Lumen can help you go paperless. Each month, you’ll get a bill-ready email with a link to view your bill details or pay your bill online. When you sign up, you’ll receive your invoice sooner, reduce the time you spend with paper invoices, and help the environment.
Accounts managed in Control Center
New accounts are automatically set up with paperless billing unless otherwise requested. The first time you sign in to Control Center, be sure to set up notifications so you know when your invoice is ready to view.
- Click your username (in the upper-right corner), then click My Profile to verify and/or edit your profile information, including email address.
- Click your username (in the upper-right corner), then click Notification Setting to make sure notifications that your invoice is ready to view are sent using your preferred contact method.
- To add new accounts to Control Center, click Admin > Enterprises, then click Add Accounts. For existing accounts, click Billing > Account Settings > Paperless Billing.
Customer portals
Use Control Center to access to critical business information anytime, day or night. It provides an easy, flexible way to view invoices, submit repair tickets, check the status of an order, and more.
Control Center uses a hierarchy of enterprise IDs and accounts to show your organization's information. You assign users access those enterprise IDs and accounts, and then grant permissions for what tasks a user can access. If you need to access more than one enterprise ID, you can add the same username to each enterprise ID so the you can toggle between enterprise IDs rather than having to sign in and out using separate usernames. You can also set a default enterprise ID so you see that information when you sign in.
Need to register for Control Center?
Enterprise:
- 877-453-8353, option 5
- control.center@lumen.com
National Wholesale:
- 866-434-2555
- wnsd@lumen.com
Get help using Control Center
In Control Center, click the Help link at the top of any page to access our support library or use the “Walk Me Through” feature at the bottom-right of every page for step-by-step navigation. You can also access help content for Control Center without signing in.
Solutions overview
We have helped many organizations, like yours, understand and leverage new digital technologies to stay competitive, improve the user experience and/or drive disruption in your industry while controlling costs and focusing on your most-crtitical business goals. Customer core business challenges and objectives drive digital transformation efforts—or the adoption of these new technologies.
As your strategic partner for empowering your technologies to help achieve your business objectives and drive digital transformation efforts, we are here to help—whether to improve efficiencies, enhance agility, improve security and mitigate risk, or enable a differentiated customer experience. Helping organizations to implement agile IT environments that are simple, secure, scalable, and high-performance, to meet rapidly changing business demands is in our DNA. Our experts are always here to help understand your opportunities and solution the right components and systems to help you compete stronger.
Our expertise spans business connectivity, infrastructure, data science, and security integrated within our comprehensive portfolio of Networking, Hybrid IT and Cloud, Voice and Unified Communications, Managed and IT Services and Security delivering agile, simplified end-to-end solutions to help you achieve your business and technology objectives of today and into the future.
Connecting the digital business
Organizations around the world trust Lumen with the reliability of their networking and hybrid cloud solutions to help enable workforces to compete stronger and drive better results. As your strategic partner empowering your technology for achieving your digital business goals, Lumen understands that the confluence of business agility, efficiency and security relies on the strength of your foundational infrastructure.
Our certified Consulting and Managed Services expertise combined with our global portfolio of Adaptive Networking, Hybrid Cloud, Voice & Unified Communications, and Security offerings allow us to deliver comprehensive and inherently secure solutions for full-scale agility, efficiency, and simplified management.
Whether you’re looking to simplify your IT environment, reduce risk, drive faster innovation, or differentiate your customer experience, our experts assess your needs and offer solutions to help you compete stronger today and into the future.
Networking
Every business is unique and creating the right networking ecosystem to accomplish your organization’s user experience, resiliency and security objectives is paramount. Lumen adaptive networking solutions are inherently secure and high-performing for powering your voice, video and data applications. We deliver both public and private connectivity options via fiber or the public cloud, to help ensure reliable and secure access whenever and virtually wherever you need.
We can help you remove business risk by offering managed and co-managed solutions that provide the tools, technology and expertise needed for design, deployment, configuration, management, service migration, vendor management and technical support across the entire WAN solution, while you maintain agility with full visibility and control.
Hybrid cloud
The efficiency and agility gains of cloud computing have redefined what digital transformation really means. As your trusted advisor with design, implementation and support expertise, Lumen can help you drive your transformation. With expansive connections to premier cloud service providers worldwide, and multi-cloud management tools and services, our hybrid cloud solutions give you both choice and control to drive improved governance, simplify your environment and efficiently expand for driving new market innovation.
Voice & unified communication
Today’s most effective businesses implement purpose-built approaches for effective collaboration among employees, partners and end-customers. Lumen can help you design, implement and support solutions for driving more efficient and secure communication and collaboration solutions throughout your organization. From application uptime and accessibility for your global workforce, to TDM to VoIP, and a full suite of collaboration tools and API capabilities, Lumen can help you lower costs and increase productivity.
Security
As the cyber threat landscape continues to advance, you can’t afford to have a false sense of security. To help ensure the security and resiliency of your environment and data, Lumen delivers a holistic approach to its adaptive security solutions, one that is integrated throughout your business’ network connectivity, hosting infrastructure, applications and end-point devices. Our multi-layered approach to assess, predict, protect and respond to threats, combined with the comprehensive view we provide across your IT landscape allows for proactive risk mitigation of your end-to-end ecosystem.
Managed & IT services
Whether by driving efficiencies, supporting new innovations or by protecting existing assets, IT organizations are required to contribute to the business’ bottom line objectives. With Lumen as your trusted advisor—delivering comprehensive managed services and consulting expertise—your IT organization can rapidly evolve to support the business. Our certified network and hybrid hosting experts can help you design and manage your environment more efficiently, and our accredited data science experts can help you cultivate a data-driven culture throughout your organization for enabling smarter decision-making and improved innovation that drives increased ROI.
Glossary
Remembering all the new terms you've been introduced to can be daunting. Below, is a list to help you keep track:
| BTN | Billing telephone number: number associated with your billing. |
| CCD | Customer commit date: the date that Lumen expects to deliver service to you. |
| CNR | Customer not ready: status assigned by Lumen when you do not respond or are unable to test; can also be applied when submitting a DLR after the required deadline. |
| CPA | Customer provided access: termination at the customer’s premises. |
| CRD | Customer requested due date |
| DLR | Design layout report/record: the detailed design path of a completed circuit including all equipment and network components from one end of the circuit to another |
| GCR | Global change request: network maintenance events schedule by Lumen with notification provided to customers who may be affected. |
| ICB | Individual case basis: a determination upon analysis of your specific type of service and requirements. |
| LEC | Local exchange carrier: Verizon, BT, AT&T. |
| LNP | Local number portability: a Lumen group that manages the transfer of your local phone numbers. |
| MRC | Monthly recurring charges: charges that are billed every month on your account. |
| MSA | Master service agreement: a contract that documents the terms and conditions applicable to your services. |
| MTTR | Mean time to restoration: a standard measurement for service restoration. |
| NID | Network interface device |
| NOC | Network Operations Center |
| NRC | Non‑recurring charges: a one‑time charge on your account (e.g., activation fee). |
| NSA | Non‑service affecting: any scheduled maintenance that will not impact your service. |
| Off‑Net | Off‑network: connection to a third‑party provider to reach the Lumen network. |
| On‑Net | On‑network: connected directly to the Lumen network. |
| SE | Sales engineer: your point of contact for network design strategy and technical service guidance and information. |
| TAE | Technical assurance engineers: your contact for gathering technical details for your service order. |
| TDM | Time division multiplexer: a device which derives multiple channels on a single transmission facility by connecting bit streams one at a time at regular intervals. |
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