Isabella Bank  

Business need
"Hi, I'm Vern Houin, Network Manager for Isabella Bank.

My name's Jon Wainwright; I'm IT Director for Isabella Bank. Isabella Bank is a commercial bank in the state of Michigan. We're in central Michigan; approximately 1.1 billion in assets with 27 locations and our company is a subsidiary called FGIS and we do all the IT functions for Isabella Bank.

Vern Houin: Isabella Bank was in a state of expanding and preparing to embrace some of the new technologies, wanted to be able to get away from the fairly risky frame relay network that we currently had and also be able to expand into voice over IP and quality of service and some of those things that the new technologies were able to bring us, and we looked for a solution for that as well as the long distance, which was now coming up for renewal. We wanted to get a more contiguous solution so that we didn't have 70 phone bills coming in every month, you know, from different companies; try to bring that together in a comprehensive electronic solution for this and it seemed like a good time to make that move."

Why Qwest?
Vern: Houin:
"We chose Qwest because they gave us a chance to consolidate our electronic billing into one- the Q-Solution that they provided. It gives us a chance then to actually consolidate all of those long distance bills, so they became our solution for all the long distance, cleaned up a lot of those problems that we were having. And also we felt like they were going to give us the service and support long term that we were looking for, and it's very important to us, you know, in Michigan, in a small community, to have that local contact and that presence--so we feel like they're here for us for the long term.

We felt like they designed us a solution which would fit our business at that time and would enable us then to get the right fit after they left. So it was important to us to have a business partner in all aspects, and also they brought some experience and some tools to the table which were very valuable in the way of addressing those needs and we were very impressed with the approach, hands-on, and having a business partner.

Jon Wainwright:
One of the things that we felt was very important was that actually Qwest was not the lowest bidder, and it was more important for us to have a solution with a face-to-face account team and a face-to-face sales and engineering team than it was to pay cheap bucks and have nothing to support that. So it was more important for us to pay a few extra dollars and have an account relationship that we really could be comfortable with."

Measurable benefits
Jon Wainwright:
"A few of the things that we see as quantifiable: With the Qwest solution on long distance, we actually were able to achieve a lower per-minute rate than we had with our previous supplier, so we feel that's a quantitative factor that we can hang our hats on. The other thing that we see is with the Qwest solution, on our help desk we track a lot of the types of activity that come through the help desk. We get approximately 500 calls a month at our help desk and less than two percent of those are phone system or voice over IP-related, so we're looking at approximately 10 or less calls a month in an organization that has in excess of 350 people. So it's--as far as a phone system is concerned, it takes care of itself.

And lastly, we have had frame relay contracts and some of those are starting to come due that we were not originally able to actually convert to the Qwest solution, but as those are coming due, we're moving them over now and in some cases we're able to do that at a two-thirds savings. I mean, we're literally looking at rates a third the size that we had them with our prior vendor. So the bucks are on the table--they're there."

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