Filltek  

Business need

"The need that we had business-wise was brought to our attention when we had an outside vendor come to us that told us they could reduce our long-distance service cost. And then as we started looking at that and reviewing our contracts with our current vendor, we noticed some other pieces in regards to account management and contract management that made us very eager to reevaluate our service offerings that we had from our current vendor."

Customer service

"The Qwest customer service has gone very well. The account management side has been very good for us. We feel like we get extremely quick response rates. When we make a call to our account manager from Qwest, we really almost get the impression, you know, 'Geez, we're the only customer they have.' I mean, they treat us very well; they answer questions very quickly; they're very prompt on keeping us in the follow-up and in the loop of where the question is.

The questions that we run into—you know, we have some billing questions that come up at times mainly due to the fact that long-distance bills can be pretty lengthy with all the different calls and numbers that come in and whether the call comes in switched or dedicated or inbound/outbound, so there're some questions that have come up on that; we've been able to go back through our bills with our account management team and determine that we'd had, at original implementation, a service or two added to an 800 number that we weren't utilizing and we've been able to go in and due to the recommendation of the Qwest account management team, they said 'Well geez, you're not utilizing these services; we should remove them.'

And we thought that was pretty nice because not everybody's willing to remove services that you're not utilizing if you don't even know you're not utilizing them. So that's gone very well for us.

The only real communication we've had with any of the technical staff or the engineering staff has been at implementation, and since then I guess the best news is we just don't have any issues.

The calls come in, the system runs, the network's been very reliable for us, and we just haven't had any issues on the networking side that we've had to look at. The only thing that we've done since implementation is installed an additional 800 number, and all that has gone very well."

Why Qwest

"There was really three main reasons that Qwest was chosen. The first was probably the account management, meaning that we felt that the team that Qwest brought to the table in regard to putting the proposal together and then any questions we had about the proposal, we were getting immediate responses with technicians on the phones.

If we had a question about how a billing process may go in the future or we had a question about how a line would be installed, very shortly after those questions were posed we were on the phone with the appropriate people at Qwest getting those questions answered, and getting a lot of senior people at Qwest—a lot of people at the director and VP level kind of coming in and helping assist on those questions. So it made us feel like they were very eager to win our business and we were a very important client to them.

And then price—unfortunately, in today's world price is always a factor. We felt the pricing that Qwest came back with was very competitive.

And then looking at some future processes that they have, our business wants to do more in the international market and we felt the Qwest network was very strong in the international market, specifically because they have a lot of their own cable that they run across versus leasing or piggybacking on someone else's. "