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Business Need

"Well, the top three that I had for the business need or objective was consolidation of existing carriers, reducing our costs, and upgrading the speed of our Internet connection at our sites. We had a number of local exchange carriers throughout our 450 stores, so we probably had 50 to 60 different vendors that we dealt with on a monthly basis and got billed by them, so we were looking to consolidate to reduce the number of players that we had to deal with. We had a price objective for each store and when we looked at different solutions, we took that price objective for each store and compared it to what we could get and, with a technology upgrade, could we break even from what our current cost structure was to what the proposed cost structure would be from all the different vendors who participated.

For a technology upgrade, we're really looking to increase Internet speeds. The majority of our sites had 144k DSL and we were looking to upgrade to a T1 facility which we could get a four-hour SLA on, and also upgrade our speeds up to 768k of Internet."

Why Qwest

"The reason we chose Qwest was because of a strong presence in our area. Qwest covered the most stores of any vendor and a lot of it came down to many of our sites are in the Qwest 14-state area, but they cover many out-region areas also and they could cover 365 of our 450 sites; the next nearest competitor could cover about 280 sites. We already use Qwest for a number of services in our corporate facility. We had a number of stores already serviced by Qwest in the 14-region Qwest area, and their pricing was the lowest that came in of all the vendors.

We were impressed with their local account team and we were impressed with the project management skills and team they brought forward during our RFP process to address our questions on how would this project be completed. They provided a very precise and detailed project plan about how we would get through this deployment of our 365 sites."

Customer Service

"The customer service from Qwest has been excellent. They assigned us right away a lead customer service advocate who we could call or e-mail on a daily basis who would escalate any issues that we had as far as installations went. We also had a strong local Qwest team including our account rep and their management who would take our issues and work on them immediately. When we did have some capacity issues early on in the project, they addressed those by bringing in a senior level Qwest executive and it made our management feel much more secure in our decision and also displayed that Qwest was taking action to resolve some of these issues.

Specifically from our local team, the technical competence is very strong and they are able to address any questions that we had, whether it was on the actual physical installation of equipment or on feature sets that come with the Qwest IA product. We also have talked to Qwest product development people who have been excellent in covering all areas of features of their product to our satisfaction."