CenturyLink 2004 Annual Report Download - page 5

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We are pleased to have achieved these
results, and we are committed to further
enhancing our network and product bundles
to support future revenue growth.
Our Primary Focus – Our Customers
We believe the keys to our ability to deliver
strong results are pretty straightforward:
we listen to what our customers tell us
about their service needs, and we build and
maintain high-quality communications
networks to deliver to our customers the
fairly priced, advanced communications
solutions they demand.
For example, listening to our customers
revealed that they prefer the availability of
various speeds and prices when selecting
their broadband service. We responded by
modifying our DSL service offerings to allow
our customers additional flexibility in choosing
a broadband speed and price that meet their
specific needs. By leveraging our scalable
broadband network and back office systems,
we were able to meet this customer need and
to capitalize on revenue opportunities, often
before competitive alternatives were available.
Similarly, we understand that our customers
appreciate the convenience and value of
purchasing a bundle of communications
services for one price. We focused on this
demand during 2004, modifying our service
bundles to include more services and greater
value. This focus drove a 51 percent increase
in our Simple Choice™bundles during the
year, helping to offset the loss of revenue
from access line declines and decreased
regulatory recoveries.
We have also been working to enhance the
services that we will include in future bundled
offerings. Over the last several months we
have been field-testing a switched digital
video service that delivers high-quality video
services, broadband and traditional voice
and long distance services over our existing
network. The technology has proved promising
and we expect to commercially deploy the
service to selected markets in 2005. Over
the past year we have also entered into
strategic relationships with EchoStar and
Cingular that will allow us to include satellite
video and wireless services as part of our
bundled offerings.
CenturyTel Is Positioned to
Meet Competitive Challenges
The telecommunications industry is
grappling with a variety of important issues.
The competitive landscape for local exchange
companies is changing to include not only
competitive local exchange carriers, but also
wireless service providers, cable companies
and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP)
carriers that rely upon the network investment
of others to deliver their services.
We are seeing increased competition for
our customers, particularly in our more densely
populated markets, and we expect competition
to increase as most large cable companies
have announced or begun implementing
plans to provide telecommunications services.
We believe our network and our employees
are well positioned to aggressively contend
with competitors who enter our markets.
We have established a frontline organization
structure that places our decision-making
employees as close to our customers as
possible. Our employees are in our markets
every day building relationships with the
customers and communities we serve. We
rely on input from these employees to assess
service needs and competitive threats. We
monitor those markets where we believe
competitive threats are most likely to arise
and modify our pricing and product sets to
preemptively address competitive challenges.
We also believe that our high-quality,
broadband networks offer us an advantage
in responding to competitive threats. We
typically have the most robust broadband
networks in our markets, and we expect to
CENTURYTEL 2004 ANNUAL REPORT