Construction 70  

Business Need

"Initially, our phone system was about seven or eight years old, and we were sort of married to the vendor. Every time we had a changeover in personnel or needed to move a phone, we had to call them to come out and reprogram names and extension numbers, and it was pretty much a constant headache in managing that system--so that was probably the big catalyst to get us to start looking around and to find out what was available out there.

Because of the old technology that our existing phone system had us shackled with, there were a lot of things that we weren't able to do that were pretty standard in the industry at that time; simple things like being able to transfer a phone call to an extension in an office, to be able to transfer it to a cell phone, or even a home phone if I had a project manager or somebody that was working from home for that day. The old technology just absolutely was prohibitive and wouldn't let us do that. But we needed to have that flexibility because our workload was expanding in an ever-growing area and a lot of our project managers we wouldn't see for a day or two because the projects that they were working on or reviewing would prohibit them from being able to see the project and drive into the office within an eight or a ten-hour period. So we needed to have a little more flexibility about being able to get calls to our people that were out in the field."

Why Qwest

"We've had Qwest as a service provider for probably 15 or 16 years, and in that time frame, they've been a constant in our business. Anytime that we've had any challenges or new business needs, we've always been able to contact somebody there that can sort of guide us through some of the options and systems that were available to us to fill those needs. So we figure that if these people have been with us this long, they're probably on top of what's going on as far as phone systems are concerned and can probably bring a wealth of information into the conversation as we were going through the evaluation process."

Customer Service

"After the installation, the sales rep at Qwest called me two or three times to see if everything's going okay, to see if any questions popped up, see if there's anything else that we need to do to expand or tweak or change the existing system--and that reinforced that we had made the right decision to go with this system and to use Qwest as the provider to do that.

The installation process was equally satisfying because the individuals that came out to actually do the hardware installation and the software programming and training were just as interested in making the transition as smooth as possible and making sure that when they walked out the door at the end of that day, we were comfortable to be able to operate the new equipment that they had just installed.

We changed over phone systems, so naturally it's not going to go 100 percent as planned. It looked real good on paper, but when you get into the actual implementation, there are always situations that come up, and this installation was no different. But the responsiveness of the Qwest staff to deal with, work through, and remedy these problems was just incredible. It reinforced the fact that we had made the right choice and had the right people out here doing the work for us."