Doss Aviation  

Business Need

"Ours was strictly a greenfield implementation. Everything that we were doing was all brand new. It's kind of one of those things; we needed an integrator who could come in and actually provide us an end-to-end solution, something that we knew we could rely on from a scalability perspective, from a management perspective, from an ease-of-use, if you will. And really when we looked at the greenfield implementation, we looked at the site that we had; it was kind of one of those that we knew we could leverage a cost savings if we went with an integrated solution versus kind of a piecemeal voice/data solution. So the solution we ended up ultimately choosing allowed us to do that.

In the TDM world versus the voice over IP world, you do not have a central area for TDM service--well, you do; you have a central phone closet, if you will. But that phone closet is full of all kinds of copper wires. It's going everywhere; it looks like you need a decoder ring to get everything out of that room. The voice over IP environment is, quite frankly, all server-based. Basically, you plug a phone into the wall, that phone talks to the server and registers itself and bingo--you have yourself a fully functioning extension wherever you'd like it to be.

The key for us--again, going back to ease of management as one of those things that we absolutely had to have because of our small IT department. I could not sacrifice a technician in a TDM closet cross-connecting wires all day long. We don't have time for that kind of implementation. So when the voice over IP solution was brought to us, we said 'Hey--you mean I can dedicate one technician for my phones and I don't have to back that up in the phone closet? That's the way to go.' And that's what we chose."

Why Qwest

"First off, our account team couldn't have been any better. We were very pleased to have people who could design the solution for us. They were great at it. Their customer service and follow-up skills as well as the overall installation--really, that is what sealed the deal for me. The fact that my account team put the time into me that I was expecting out of my account team, basically sat with me through hand-holding of the process, everything I was asking for; designed the solution that I specified--they didn't sell me a bill of goods, they didn't sell me a solution that I didn't need; they sold me the one that I wanted, they sold me the one that worked best for our business. Honestly, it was not the cheapest solution--it was not the cheapest solution at all. We really thought cost was going to be the main driving factor, and it ended up being a big deal here, but we chose the most expensive solution by far and away--and we did that because we had that level of comfort with our account team. We knew we weren't going to be left high and dry when it came down to install and implementation. We knew our account team was going to stand strong with us."

Customer Service

"Our account team is really three major people: Our account manager, our sales engineer, and our CPE specialist. The CPE specialist and the sales engineer really took the design really by the horns and really put together the solution for us that we eventually bought from Qwest. It turns out the CPE specialist was extremely knowledgeable in everything that he was doing, and our account manager provided us that layer one support that we expected as well. Our sales engineer--our sales engineer was able to quote many things out for us, did a great job throughout the lifecycle of the quoting process, got the quotes to me in the time that I needed them and was able to get the contracts sealed up as I needed those as well. So we found, again, that the account team was critical to this process and really was the key to making this whole implementation succeed."