TricorBraun®  

Business Need

"When I started at Tricor Braun, we had about 28 offices and they were all running on different PBXs. We had a lot of support issues because some people had contracts, some people didn't. We weren't sure that we could actually maintain and support these things. So after we had the solid network in place, we decided to go out and take a look at a consolidated system to help out with administration, to send voice mails companywide, to be able to control things centrally. We weren't looking for a straight ROI on long distance or anything like that, but we were interested in a more cohesive system, four-digit dial between branches, and things of that sort."

Why Qwest

"We'd been using Qwest exclusively for our data network, and as we began to realize that we were moving into voice over IP, the data network becomes extremely important. Qwest was able to bring to the table various experts from the data networking side, from the Cisco side, and kind of present a holistic approach; go to one company and everything is taken care of.

The other thing Qwest was able to bring to the table was very strong pricing that I don't feel that most other companies could bring to the table. So between Qwest and Cisco working together, it was kind of a single point of contact--and very good pricing."

Customer Service

"We use the Qwest IP NOC [network operations center] service to maintain our circuits, and they have a wide variety of tools that allow us to do this in a way that is suitable for our department and keeps us up to date, so we're very happy with that. The thing about the IP NOC is that they're great, and we've worked with a lot of NOCs or support centers that are not great. Qwest, of course, is 24x7; people always answer. The technicians are knowledgeable, and they understand the urgency, and they go ahead and get things escalated, and they get the local exchange carrier dispatched on site to solve problems. So we've always had very good success calling the IP NOC and getting the kind of follow-up and response that we need to resolve a problem.

One of the other things that's been helpful for us is Qwest has a customer portal. It allows us to go in and review our bill and dive into the details and see if there are issues. If you submit a trouble ticket online with them for a circuit, then you get e-mail updates any time the technician at the IP NOC updates anything about the ticket.

That's very helpful for us because users out in the field are constantly calling us asking us for updates. If you have to call the LEC back every time to get an update or if you go for two-, three-, four-hour stretches without updates, you can't really keep the users at bay, if you will, and let them know it's being worked on."