Inside Lumen Connect: A New Era of Enterprise Self Service

Tony:
Hello, I’m Tony Mangino from TC2, and this is Staying Connected—where we talk about what really matters to enterprise buyers navigating today’s technology and sourcing decisions.  Today we’ll be discussing a major update for Lumen enterprise customers: the evolution from the Control Center portal to the newly branded Lumen Connect, which just rolled out this week.

If you’re an IT leader, network architect, or anyone who lives inside service portals and tickets, you’ve likely received many emails in January from Lumen about this change.  This change matters. Your portal is your “mission control” for circuits, services, incidents, and billing, and Lumen Connect is designed to modernize that experience with a more unified, secure, and self‑service‑oriented platform.

Today I’m joined by Theresa Knutson, a fellow director here at TC2 and head of our IT Cost Management practice.  We’ll cover what’s changing with this rollout, why Lumen is making these moves now, and what steps your team should be taking. Welcome, Theresa.

Theresa:
Thanks, Tony. Great to be back with you.

Tony:
Let’s start with the basics. What is Lumen Connect?

Theresa:
It’s essentially what used to be Lumen’s portal known as Control Center, now rebranded and improved. Lumen describes the portal as being designed for speed, simplicity, and control, and as delivering real‑time visibility, actionable insights, and self‑service tools to help you optimize operations and accelerate innovation.

Practically speaking, it’s their web‑based enterprise portal that gives customers access to service inventory, ticketing, orders, billing, performance analytics, and diagnostics in one place. Over the past few years, Lumen has steadily evolved this portal—improving navigation, consolidating services under a single Services view, and adding dashboards and KPIs so customers can see the health of their network and services at a glance.

Tony: So what’s new in the January 2026 rollout?

Theresa:
From Lumen’s notifications on this rollout, Lumen Connect brings several key enhancements:

• A new look and feel with streamlined navigation and guided onboarding to help users find what they need faster.
• Enhanced features like real‑time dashboards, proactive alerts, and stronger self‑service tools.
• More robust self‑service and automation with enhanced help resources, richer service detail pages, and on‑demand workflows that enable faster answers and fewer support tickets.
• And it’s positioned as your launchpad for AI and digital growth, giving unified control over infrastructure, connectivity, communications, and security services.

Your login remains the same and is secured by two‑factor authentication. If you don’t already have an authenticator app set up, you’ll need to download and configure one, but that’s a quick step and a worthwhile security improvement.

Tony:
So, headline first: Control Center becomes Lumen Connect. Lumen has been clear that this is a customer‑driven transformation—taking feedback from how enterprises actually use the portal and redesigning it to better support modern, hybrid, and AI‑driven environments. The intent is that if you’re rolling out new applications, expanding edge capacity, tightening security, or researching billing and ticket status, you can coordinate those moves in one place.

Theresa:
Exactly. On the user‑experience side, Lumen Connect delivers a more modern, intuitive interface with real‑time visibility and a focus on proactive management, so teams can see trends and potential issues earlier instead of reacting after the fact. I logged in today and it’s clearly refreshed and easier to navigate to the information and actions you need. Lumen also provides a lot of helpful content under the Lumen Connect Help link on the left side of the screen. With just a few clicks, you can access the site map, which gives an overview of menus and functions, and then drill into detailed information on each of those areas.

Tony: This update really doubles down on self‑service and automation. Those enhanced help resources, richer service detail pages, and on‑demand workflows are all aimed at giving your team faster answers, empowering them to handle more tasks directly in the portal, and reducing the number of support tickets you need to open for routine changes or questions.” Why does Lumen Connect—and these updates—matter for enterprises?

Theresa:
We’ve all seen over the past few years that suppliers have streamlined, meaning reduced, the hands‑on support provided by account teams and pushed customers toward portals for self‑service. For enterprise IT and network operations, a more capable portal directly impacts day‑to‑day efficiency. When ticketing, service inventory, diagnostics, billing, and maintenance notifications are integrated and easier to find, teams can move from incident detection to root‑cause and remediation much more quickly.

Tony:
This portal evolution aligns with Lumen’s broader investments in its network and edge capabilities to support new workloads, including AI and data‑intensive applications. As that underlying infrastructure modernizes, Lumen Connect becomes the control plane you use to actually consume, govern, and optimize those services. So, what should customers do now?

Theresa:
First, make sure your team knows about these changes and encourage them to use Lumen Connect. Getting data, reports, and status information immediately—rather than waiting for an account team to respond—will speed up your operations.Second, revisit your access and roles. Confirm that the right admins, engineers, and finance stakeholders can sign in and see the sections they need—whether that’s Admin, Services, Service Management, Reports, or Billing—and align those permissions with your internal separation‑of‑duties policies. A key point, and this is true for all supplier portals, is making sure that all of your accounts—and only your accounts—are correctly represented in the portal. If all accounts aren’t loaded, you won’t be able to get complete and accurate information. If your enterprise has gone through divestitures, double‑check that accounts associated with divested entities are not still visible. Account maintenance is critical.

Fourth+, embed Lumen Connect into your runbooks. For outage response, change management, and maintenance communications, explicitly document how your teams should use the portal—where to check for planned work, how to open and track tickets, and which dashboards should be reviewed in daily or weekly ops meetings. From a billing perspective, if you have a TEM provider, they’re likely already using the portal because that’s where they gather your invoice data on a regular basis.

And lastly, and most importantly, request training from your Lumen account team to make this portal more integrated into your environment. Include IT, finance, procurement, and your help desk team. Ask your Lumen account rep to host a couple of training sessions so they can show your team how to access Connect and how to use the platform effectively in real‑world scenarios.

Tony:
Thanks Theresa.  If your organization relies on Lumen, now is a great time to brief your teams on Lumen Connect and start thinking about how to fully leverage the portal’s capabilities. And if you want help benchmarking your use of Lumen’s tools against industry best practices, TC2 is ready to support you.  Lastly, if you’d like to learn more about the Lumen Control Center Upgrade or have questions about other supplier portals, please reach out to Theresa directly.  Or, if you’d like to discuss other technology strategy, sourcing and cost reduction needs with Theresa, me, or any of our TC2 and LB3 colleagues, please give us a call or shoot us an email.

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