Centennial Bank Hldgs  

Business Need

"I guess our primary driver when we were looking around at solutions, we had a thin client environment and fewer and fewer of the applications that we were being forced to use were supported in that thin client environment. So weneeded to go to PCs on every desktop and we didn't want to locate servers at all of our locations. That was the reason we went with thin clients to begin with. The only way to put servers in a central location was to have bandwidth that was much higher than a traditional T-1. We had additionally wanted to go to some IP trunking of ourvoice traffic from location to location and, again, we needed more than a traditional T-1 bandwidth to be able to do that."

Why Qwest

"I think we chose Qwest because it was a very cost effective solution. The reputation of Qwest--we've done a lot of business with Qwest on other products. Their service and support has always been phenomenal for us. We were looking to consolidate our telecom services as much as we could and this was just a natural fit.

Primarily, it was a labor saver to be able to pay a few bills to one company rather than a bill here for voice and a bill here for data and a bill here for some other telecom service. It's nice to be able to work with one company. We have a single point of contact at Qwest regardless of what our billing questions are about. We understand the process for reporting network problems with Qwest, so kind of the consolidation of a telco provider allows us to basically have one-stop shopping for everything around telco from billing to actual network usage, management, service, support--that whole thing."

Customer Service

"It's been excellent. I think we've had one sort of marginal experience with Qwest and it basically stemmed from a misunderstanding when we divested a small company and there were some directory assistance issues that we didn't communicate clearly. Other than that, responsiveness has been fantastic. On the QMOE side especially, we get calls from the Qwest NOC up in Minneapolis, I guess it is, usually before we even know there's a problem, and that's saying a lot because we are a very network-centric company. So when we don't yet know that the network is going to create an issue and we get a call from Qwest, that makes us feel pretty good."