BUCA, Inc.  

Business Need

"The main driver was more technological. We had a growing demand for the bandwidth that we had in place, some critical applications and some not so critical applications. Basically the scenario is we have all of our various locations throughout the country and, based on schedule, calls to those locations get sent to a call center here in Minneapolis to be answered for questions, reservations, menus--you name it, guest services provides that service to our guests. There really never was anything in place to guarantee that voice had priority on the network, and with the addition of gift card services and credit card services, we also wanted to guarantee that certain other services had priority, and we didn't have the ability to do that. We also noticed that during high traffic periods such as times when our heavy reservations--Mother's Day, Valentine's Day, those types of things--when the call value was at a peak, our call quality would begin to suffer. Now granted that's only a few times a year, but it all boils down to revenue. I mean, if a call is lost, that could add up to a lost reservation and that equates directly to dollars."

Customer Service

"Well, it's a little bit different now. I used to just call in to a NOC and speak with a technician who had direct access to a switch and they could go in and test a circuit, analyze a circuit, look at the circuit's configuration, so on and so forth, and dispatch resources out into the field. Now with Integrated Management, the contact with that group is relatively limited. They're proactive with issues, so I don't have a lot of contact with them. In the instances that I have had contact with them, they've always dealt with issues efficiently and professionally and I think they've got the technical chops to address Cisco equipment and the service provider side of things, but I don't contact them much with troubles anymore. What happens is if they detect trouble either in the early stages or an outage type situation, I get notified immediately; whether it's just a single ping failure or if a circuit is down or if a larger group of facilities is being affected by something, I get notified right away of the trouble and they also add in the notes the actions that they're taking to resolve those troubles. You know, from a 5-mile view, that's what the service looks like, and they pursue troubleshooting with the facilities folks over there and they also handle the customer premise equipment. So if it's a problem with a router, they go ahead and get new equipment out to site, or if its facilities, they work with Qwest's IT group and get the issue resolved that way."