Murdochs Ranch  

Business Need

"Primarily, we were looking at replacing Internet access at a number of locations. We chose Integrated Access to reduce the number of phone lines at our stores and to reduce our data costs for Internet access. All our stores come to our ERP system via VPN, so the data part of it's really critical. And Integrated Access just happened to be a very good fit for our situation in that the combination of the number of telephone lines that we need in conjunction with the bandwidth that we need for data happen to fit into T1 bandwidth very well."

Why Qwest

"We had one specific proposal from a company that came in and they would have been able to do all our Internet access at a pretty good rate, but they couldn't handle the voice side of it, and Qwest came in and basically for essentially the same amount provided both the Internet access and the voice component. So for us, it was really pretty much of a no-brainer--the Qwest proposal won hands down just because they could provide more of the service that we need. The other reason that we chose Qwest was for service reasons. We know that Qwest is very well established; that if we have problems, we can get Qwest's support people to those locations and get the level of service we need. So service is always big. If our stores are offline because the Internet circuit is down, then that is a real expense for us because our point of sale is run over the VPN across the Internet. So we wanted to know that we were going to have a high level of reliability and if we needed to have service, that there would be someone who could be there. We know that Qwest has those capabilities. Most of the other providers that we dealt with were relatively small, and so the Qwest knowledge comes in--you know, can they provide the level of service that we need? And quite often, the answer is 'No'."

Customer Service

"The customer service at Qwest has been very good. I will say that from past experiences, the level of service can be a function of the sales representative, and currently our sales representative's taking very good care of us. I've had experiences with Qwest with other sales representatives that haven't been as attentive to our needs. I have had discussions with Qwest about that, but I really haven't had any issues with service for the better part of four years. And from a technical perspective, when we have technical issues, the Qwest technical service is very strong. In situations where we have had service go down, Qwest has been aware of the problem immediately, has contacted us, and typically the outage has been an acceptable period of time. So the service has actually been quite good."