Blog January 3, 2023

Looking Back at a Milestone Year: Our Journey to Exceed Customer Expectations with our Service

As we look ahead to 2023, it’s important to take the time to reflect on a year of investment at Zayo and, most importantly, what these investments mean for our customers.

“We are on a mission to provide our customers with an exceptional experience and connect what’s next for their businesses,” said Steve Smith, CEO of Zayo. “Our team has made significant progress this past year to make this possible, from making Zayo’s largest network investment to date to multiple strategic acquisitions. The growth and advancements made to our network quality, service delivery, and overall customer experience were made possible by our team’s commitment to continue listening to and prioritizing our customers’ feedback. Zayo will continue to invest, expand and advance its network and solution capabilities to ensure we remain ahead of our customers’ needs now and in the future.”

Let’s take a look back at 2022’s biggest milestones.

Investments in infrastructure

In 2022, our customers have been faced with tight supply chains, reduced IT budgets, and continued pressure to digitally transform. Over the past year, Zayo made a substantial $250 million investment in our global infrastructure – the largest network expansion in our company’s 15-year history – to address these new customer challenges.

This investment includes long-haul dark fiber builds and 400G Wavelengths upgrades to fortify and grow our network. This means that even more dark fiber capacity is available to our customers in even more areas of North America and beyond. Our customers now have access to capacity on four new long-haul dark fiber routes, one overbuilt long-haul dark fiber route, and 24 routes upgraded to 400G capacity. This will give our customers the bandwidth needed to innovate and build what’s next with more bandwidth on our expansive network.

In addition, we’ve continued to invest in our global low-latency network which connects key commercial and financial exchanges in major markets – a significant priority for global enterprise and financial services customers. This investment includes the launch of our Zeus subsea cable connecting the financial powerhouse of London, UK with mainland Europe plus three new low-latency routes connecting financial exchanges in Frankfurt, Zurich, and Bergamo, a subsea route connecting the U.S. and Tokyo, and low-latency routes connecting to the US to the growing financial hub of São Paulo, Brazil. These investments will encourage continued global growth and connection for our customers.

To meet existing and anticipated customer demand, we are working on additional network expansions and updates which are set for completion in 2023 and beyond.

Executive appointments and initiatives

As the digital infrastructure market continues to grow, Zayo has invested in building its institutional knowledge and leadership team to ensure we can deliver the solutions our customers need to drive their business. We bolstered our leadership team in 2022 with the executive appointments of Lynn D. Tinney as Senior Vice President of Channels and Partnerships and Bill Long as Chief Product Officer. Lynn’s appointment marks the growth of our channel business and a reaffirmed commitment to our valued partners.

Under Lynn’s leadership, we hosted our first-ever partner advisory board meeting from which we gathered the feedback needed to shape our continued initiatives for the channel. Bill’s extensive digital infrastructure expertise will be essential as we continue to drive growth and build on its momentum from 2022.

As part of our company’s continued dedication to providing a top-tier customer experience, we have also invested in restructuring the service delivery team and processes under the leadership of service delivery expert Bryan Fleming. The process changes implemented in 2022 will contribute to faster, more effective, and better-quality customer outcomes by increasing gross installs and on-time performance. So far, the team has seen an 18% year-over-year increase in gross installs and a 16% increase in on-time performance.

Other key appointments that support Zayo’s goals of delivering an exceptional customer experience and future-ready network infrastructure include: Jim Campbell, SVP of Solutions Architecture; DJ Leckwold, SVP of Global Customer Success; Troy Lupe, SVP of Field Operations; David Vanhoose, VP of IT Infrastrucuture and Service Management.