Brooke Insurance  

Business Need

"We decided that we needed to go out and look for a new provider to support our national toll-free number. Two of the main reasons were probably that whenever we had a change to our platform with our old provider, it was a very large and expensive issue; it was never an easy, smooth process. It would require quite an investment in time and branch resources to get any changes done, and as we are a rapidly growing company, we would need changes rather often, so we needed to look at other providers that would be able to understand our business model and grow with us as we grew. And the other issue we were really facing was that our old provider, their text-to-speech options were really jumbling. We do an agent locator here and the names are very jumbled. And other issues such as reading back cities, states--it was very poor quality. We got quite a few complaints from both consumers and our internal franchises as well, so we needed to find a provider that offered superior technology as far as reading back locations, the text-to-speech, and those types of items."

Why Qwest

"One of the reasons we were impressed by Qwest was not only were they always available on our timeline instead of us having to try to rearrange our schedules to meet with somebody else's timeline, but that the account managers, they took the time to understand our business model, which is a very complicated business model and were able to recommend ideas that fit our business model and also recommend ideas that we hadn't even thought of ourselves. They're very proactive in thinking of things that might come up in the future that we hadn't thought of and coming up with solutions to those problems. We were very impressed with how proactive they were.

Along the lines of technology for choosing the Qwest application, some of the driving forces were that the platforms were already tested and built that we were able to use. We did have to modify them slightly to fit our business model, but they were already a built and trusted system that we could go out and test on other people's applications as well and we felt that those would be easily adaptable to ours. When we talked about the text-to-speech, our old system, it was horrendous to be blunt. We were provided samples of Qwest's ability to do text to speech and the comparison wasn't even close. Qwest by far was able to do the smoothest and most audible text-to-speech which, with our platform mainly being an agent locator where you read back people's names, addresses, telephone numbers, cities, states, what types of business they do, that being audible and clearly understandable is very important with our solution. We felt that Qwest's technology with text-to-speech was far superior to the other companies that we were looking at. Also, the timeline of turnaround was, with Qwest, was months quicker than the other one. I think the closest proposal we got to Qwest's turnaround was four or five additional months past Qwest's launch date. We were a little skeptical on if Qwest could actually keep that launch date, and our launch date was exactly as planned. It was in the exact week that we had planned in the beginning, and so that was another driving force. Not only could they provide these things quicker, but they were able to provide quality products quicker."

Customer Service

"The first time we had an issue came probably a week after our launch. All of a sudden, our platform was down--never a good thing. You know, we have customers, prospects that we need to get a hold of. Previously, with our old provider, when we have had issues, it's been trying to get somebody on the phone, getting bounced around to different people, not knowing what's happening, and you're having to report to your senior management of what's going on, and often you're in the dark. When we had our first issue, I sent an e-mail and called our account manager and he immediately sent an e-mail to the tech team with in the subject line 'Urgent! High Priority! Brooke's platform down. He treated it as as much of an emergency as we treated it, where we haven't gotten that in the past. Often we're one apple in the tree and they'll get to us in the order received. One of the nice things I really appreciated was every step of the way of them fixing it, I was in the loop. They were either calling me or e-mailing me. 'We've narrowed down where the problem is; this is what we're doing to fix it. We expect this to be up in one hour.' And I was then able to relay that to my senior management. We've had very, very few problems. The problems that we have had have never repeated, which I think is the key. Whenever you have a new platform, new databases are pulling, there are problems on your side, problems on their side--there's going to be an issue every now and then. But when there was an issue, we have not had a repeat issue. We haven't had to say 'That database is down again' or 'That port's down again.' It's been taken care of, solved, not an issue again."