Walgreen Co., America’s largest and fastest growing retail pharmacy chain with over 80,000 employees, is the drugstore industry leader in sales, profits, store growth and technology use. Its currently opening over 200 stores a year with a goal of having 3,000 stores nationwide by the year 2000.

Before installing The Work Number in 1995, the Walgreen Personnel Records Department was barraged with calls from lenders requesting employment verification information. The time spent handling these frequent and often disruptive calls detracted from the critical responsibilities of the department. The challenge was to find a way of intercepting these calls to lighten the burden of staff members without sacrificing Walgreen’s well-established reputation for convenience and service.

TALX, with its reputation as industry leader in interactive communications solutions, was eager to introduce the Walgreen Co. to a far more efficient means by which to handle employment verification: The Work Number. The Work Number® is the accurate, secure and cost-efficient way for employers to automate and outsource the processing of employment and income verification requests through the simple use of a telephone. To introduce the new concept to employees, Walgreen simply posted the change internally on email. Lenders and other verifiers were notified through informational letters and voice mail messages.

The Work Number provides business-to-business service to its community of users. The database and value-added services are accessible through the Web or a touch-tone telephone. In a single Internet session or phone call, mortgage lenders, bankers and other employment verifiers immediately obtain highly accurate and complete information on applicants. When users access The Work Number, they are prompted to enter the applicant's social security number, Walgreens' company code, and a coordinating Salary Key to receive both employment and income verification information. The Work Number ensures the highest level of data integrity - the database is updated directly from the employer's payroll records every pay period.

Verifiers who subscribe are given an 800 number accessible by touch-tone telephone providing immediate credit and reference verification information, the option of fax retrieval, and fixed pricing; it simultaneously aids the verifiers in creating an internal audit trail. Non-subscribing verifiers also have access to controlled, authorized and up-to-date verification information by using a touch-tone telephone and an 800 phone number. The service prompts callers to enter a specific social security number, the Walgreens’ company code, and a coordinating authorization code to receive employment and income verification information through voice response, FAX, Email and Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) capabilities.

The Work Number offers lenders two levels of information:
1) Employment Verification allows lenders to confirm employer and employee name, employment status and job title;
2) Income Verification provides additional information including the employee’s salary history.
The Work Number ensures that employee data remains confidential and secure — only to be accessed by individuals who have received authorization.

In the words of Kris Dimitriou, Walgreen’s Manager of Personnel Services, "Without The Work Number and with our growth, we would have had to increase our staff by one person just to handle VOE’s (Verification of Employment). Thus far, the TALX solution has provided a hard savings of $28,700." Upon going live with The Work Number, the Walgreen Personnel Records Department saw an immediate decrease in verification inquiries from lenders. The Walgreen Co. estimates that usage of The Work Number in 1997 for Employment Verifications will grow 152% from 1996 levels. The Work Number also substantially reduces employee-related costs and virtually eliminates complaints relating to operator availability.

The lending activities of verifiers also benefit from The Work Number’s efficiency and flexibility. Its ease of use and instant feedback seven days a week offer verifiers an instant competitive advantage by cutting down the time it takes to process a loan. This accounts for the 860 verifiers nationwide who currently subscribe to the service and the exponential growth in member verifiers that TALX continues to see each week.

The Work Number is a national service intended to benefit all parties by providing extraordinary service, user-friendly access to employment information and immediate results. More than 100 of the nation’s largest employers outsource employment verification to TALX.