LifeLock  

Why CenturyLink?

"Bearing in mind at the time you probably didn't know the name LifeLock; it didn't mean anything as we're contacting the vendors.So I will tell you one of the interesting pieces was Qwest, [and here] I joke a little bit with them, they picked up the phone. What I really mean by that is it was a responsiveness. We really, truly had immediate response from the sales team that was not only responsive to 'Here's what we need and here's what we're looking for.' They didn't say 'Well, just who are you? Never heard of LifeLock, so let's put them over in a different pile and give them different treatment.' We got treated immediately by the sales team as a true partner, as a prospect. 'What do you really need? Can we satisfy those needs?'
I think some of the other factors were the scope of the offerings.
Really, not only did we believe we knew what we needed, but they had the expertise, the presales support, the team that could come in and give us the full scope of the offering and maybe bring to our attention other things that companies growing at our rate should consider; that they had the expertise from working and being an industry leader out there working with the other companies that had already gone through what we had--we got to leverage that expertise. So I think part of that--scope of the offering, the expertise, the support that was provided, presales support that was provided--was certainly a critical factor.
I think along with the scope of the product offering--it wasn't just, by the way, what Qwest had to offer; they also had, of course, the partnership with Cisco.
And that partnership on the hardware side really allowed us to see the full solution, and so to see them working so closely together, to be able to see it operational, up and functioning--it's not a concept on a whiteboard somewhere or on a marketing piece of paper.
Here is the partnership; we work together. We can go see it; we can see how it executes together. I think that, along with the Qwest offerings and the scope of the products that they offer, really differentiated them from the others that were out there."

Overview of Solution

"The Qwest services that we utilize based here out of our Tempe [Arizona] headquarters--where the majority of the operation that supports our nationwide program [is located].
Of course we have the [Qwest] QMOE and the [Qwest] Internet services. We have, of course, all of our voice, conferencing, toll-free, and especially the [Qwest] EZ Route [and] the [Qwest] IVR [solutions].
So both from our inbound--we actually even use [EZ Route] as well in our outbound when we have to do follow-up because, of course, we're ISO and 27001 PCI level 1 compliant, so we have to meet very high and rigorous security standards on how we contact our members, when we collect information.
Of course, EZ Route has made that extremely easy to not only track that, but utilize that as a tool to make sure we're always in compliance with our ISO and PCI level certifications."

Measurable benefits

"Once we've implemented the full QMOE solution and the data side [of] the IVR solution, we've really been able to see the efficiency gain by our member services agents in dealing with the consumers and the effectiveness of that.
We've gained efficiency at almost a double-digit rate quarter over quarter since we implemented the [IVR and EZ Route] solution[s] because it's allowed us to go out and say 'I don't need a body trying to make phone calls; we use the IVR and the EZ Route.' We've got the statistics. We know when to hit those and then it comes right in with the right infrastructure to get them to the right agent to solve the problem immediately. So the efficiency goes up.
The member has a great experience; they don't have to call in multiple times. We get it done on the first time. They get to the right people in the right time the first time. Well, that's allowed that efficiency gain, measurable, to be at almost double-digit quarter over quarter, since we put in the solution.
I would also say certainly with the toll-free services, you know, Qwest has delivered to us certainly not only competitive rates, but a great service as well. So those are easily measurable; we know what our other opportunities are, what other routes we could've chosen. They're [Qwest] very competitive, especially in the level of service they provide."