Aurora Chamber of Commerce  

Why Qwest?

"Well, the Aurora Chamber of Commerce essentially chose Qwest and ShoreTel for a couple of reasons. Number one, we had an established relationship with Qwest, and that works very strongly in their favor because we had--we'd worked successfully with them in the past, so it's like having a relative in the family; you feel a little more comfortable that way.
Qwest also came into us with a variety of packages rather than coming in and saying 'Here's what you've got; take it or leave it.' Instead, they gave us some different approaches to solving some of the problems that we had, and one of the organizations they brought in to talk to us was ShoreTel. A combination of the established relationship with Qwest, the approach that ShoreTel took--they understood what it takes to meet the needs of a small business--those two things, I think, probably were the most important to us and helped us make that decision.
Well, when I talk about different ideas, they--you know, Qwest has relationships with a lot of different organizations, so they brought us essentially three different packages. One was a top-end, high-tech kind of package; it was pretty expensive, but it offered a great deal in terms of ability to expand and do some things that we didn't, we found later in discussing it--that we didn't really need to do. One of the organizations came in to us with sort of like the cafeteria plan--you know, one of these and one of those and one of those--and by the time we added up what the needs were that we had, that also pretty much put that out of our reach. And then ShoreTel came in and said 'Okay, we understand small businesses and we're new partners with Qwest. Here's a package we can develop for you.' And that turned out to be the ideal package."

Overview of Solution

"One of the nice things about Qwest was that they provided us a package; it was a bundle. And I've seen this on TV--you know, bundle your package and everything works better. Well, I hadn't given that much thought, but when we started putting all of the pieces together at the Chamber, I discovered that in fact we did have a bundle. We upgraded our lines to T1 lines; we went to dedicated long distance using voice over IP; we were able to work with Qwest to integrate our entire computer system. And one of the things that was very important to us--we built our facility to accept Wi-Fi; to become a Wi-Fi hotspot--and this has become very important to us because it's amazing how many people who come to the Chamber and want to do work there bring their computers with them and they can plug in and immediately connect up to the Internet. So that was a very important part of things.
We have a great deal of flexibility in the office space as well; we have 20 ports, so there isn't any place that if we have to, we can't plug in phone or computers. We have a great data distribution system going there.
Qwest also helped us integrate our system--the phone system from ShoreTel with the 230 and 560 instruments and the computer system that we have, so everything talks to everything. They also showed us how we could take advantage of this package to actually drive down some of our costs. So we chose to use the 230 and 560 phone systems from ShoreTel; we had 20 ports scattered around the area, both data ports and phone ports, making sure those were all in the right place. From a technical point of view, it didn't seem to be terribly difficult, but the most important thing is it all worked as quickly as we were able to put it together."

Non-Financial Benefits

"Non-financially, a number of benefits. First of all, we have a much more reliable system than we had before. Because it's upgradable, we also have more confidence in the system--we know that in the future we can grow it as we need to grow it, and we know that things are turning over very rapidly in the technology area, so we want to be on that leading edge just like all of our members try to be, so that's very important to us.
It's also nice having a new system because the staff isn't embarrassed about the phone system. And that sounds kind of silly, but having a first-class system available for the staff makes them happy as well, and they know also that it's a first-class system and that they have some opportunities to grow in the future in the manner in which they do business--that's been very important to us.
In addition, with a bundled package we know that we only have one person we need to talk to; that gives us a sense of comfort, knowing that there's only one person we need to talk to if we have any kind of problems with any of the technology we're involved with, and that's Qwest. And Qwest has been so good in responding to us--that gives us a great deal of confidence in the system that we have.