Howard Systems International Inc.  

Business Need

"There were a couple of different components to it. We were in need of a new phone system enterprise-wide. We have multiple locations; every location needed a new phone system of some type. We had the traditional PBX setup at every one of our business locations. The maintenance costs on them were spiraling out of control because they were older systems. We wanted to both leverage the data connectivity connections we already had, so that's a fairly sizable investment; in addition, we wanted to see what products were available to us that would make our sales force truly mobile and give them a way to be able to stay connected within the enterprise via voice but make geography irrelevant."

Why Qwest

"First, we broke it down and we realized that the hosted voice over IP solution was the one that we would want, that would make the most sense for us, because of the very low entry cost; being able to discard the fear that whatever it was that we purchased, whatever capital investment we were making in hardware and software, was not one that was ours to bear. it's not something that we'd have to worry about upgrading every two or three years, which is what the problem was we had at that time. It was a system that was much more manageable; it was one that very few people could manage and administer very professionally from a central location, and we really loved the feature sets of the companies that offered the hosted VoIP solutions. The feature sets that came with those--they were all very powerful and compelling products.

Once we made the decision to go with hosted VoIP, we settled with Qwest because it seemed to be a much more mature product than what other comparable vendors seemed to be offering. We already had a tremendous amount of experience with their data services, which we were very happy with, and the decision was if their VoIP solution is anything like their data service, it was going to be a really good system.

And the presentation was phenomenal, too. When we actually talked to some of the engineers and got an understanding of what the implementation process was like and how the system actually worked and functioned, I was very comfortable with it. It sounded like a very solid solution."

Customer Service

"At the very beginning, I was pleasantly surprised; when I called their 800 number, they give you a tech support number if you have a phone issue--it's a slightly different place you would call as opposed to a data issue. You can usually get a person in under two or three minutes; it's very quick turn-up time before you can actually talk to a live person. And of course, you can also go online to the portal, using the administrative portal, and log a trouble ticket that way. Not only do I have to log very few trouble ticket calls, but if I log a trouble ticket online, I'll hit 'send', I'll flip over into my e-mail program and won't get through two or three e-mails--my phone's already ringing with someone calling me back about that particular trouble ticket; they've picked it up and they're actually working on it already.

When I said in the very beginning I'd call and get someone very quickly, I'm completely blown away by the fact that I know they've dramatically expanded the number of customers they have on this product and you still get someone very, very quickly--and oddly enough, it's not usually someone who's either reading through a knowledge base or just taking your information so they can transfer you up to someone else. The person you usually get right off the bat is someone who's all set to start working with you and troubleshoot the problem. And I've never had a problem that's lingered more than a day or two that was a show-stopper or cutting into productivity for anybody, and I've never had anything escalated or needed to bring to someone's attention that something needed to be fixed quicker or something like that."