Mainsource Financial Group  

Why Qwest?

"One was previous user support, and the biggest piece out there that I felt Qwest has over a lot of the other ones is support. I know from a standpoint when we call in for support, if we do have an issue, that I actually get to talk to a human being; I'm not directed through voice prompt that says 'Press 3 for this. Are you down? Press 2.'

And in a sense, going with the voice prompts, it seems like to place a service call in the past, it's been up to, in a sense, an hour, and the main thing we were wanting was to actually talk to a physical human being. Another piece that Qwest has is a feature called Qwest Control, which allows us to go online and look at statuses as far as how our circuits are doing, and also, too, it allows us to go out there and make changes to a line, in a sense. So if we want to add more bandwidth, make the change, and really the turnaround time on it is minimal. We're not spending weeks to get something turned up that if we've got the bandwidth, we could take, say, a fractional and increase the level of it to be the full bandwidth if we wanted to. Makes it real easy.

And then probably the last piece was price. Qwest was the most reasonable out there from a pricing standpoint. And it's not one of those 'you pay for what you get'; I think Qwest does a good offering as far as what you get is quality, and the price is very good. "

Business need

"What we had as far as a business need was that our contract was coming up for review; we were on a frame relay system and it worked fine, but we were looking for something that would allow us to have more branches because we are growing as far as an institution and this year we're adding another 10 branches.

So we kind of have those in the background as far as what we're going to be doing for the future, and one of the things that we wanted to do was some type of system that would allow us to expand, and with the MPLS, it allows us to expand fairly easily out there to add new branches. And also we wanted to start to implement voice over IP.

Before, we were using kind of an intra-line type service on our frame relay system, but that was real limited. And with the voice over IP, it allows us more of a unified communications. That piece there is what we felt was important for us going down the road. So that was kind of our need.

Then of course, too, from a pricing standpoint—is there anything cheaper out there, in a sense? You know, we're always looking for cheaper prices, but also quality, too, and that we kept in mind as far as somebody that's got a good quality service "

Customer service

"Great. Very proactive. If there are issues, they'll call us in the sense that we have them monitor our network and if they detect a link down, that we get notified of that. They open up a ticket, saves us initially probably 10-15 minutes, but if you add them up, it could amount to a lot of time. But very proactive.

They keep us up to date as far as if a circuit is not up as far as call basically every hour and say 'Got information from the local LEC; they're currently being dispatched.' Been great basically from a sales side all the way through to support side. Can't say enough about them.

And then competence has been very well on the tech side, especially, too, on the installation as far as turn-up. There may be a case out there where for whatever reason the circuit may not be coming up just right, and the tech on the other side basically gives us different options out there or they check different pieces to see 'Okay, could it be this or that?' and actually have recommendations like 'Can you check your router to see if a certain feature is on or off?'

We go out there and look and it's like 'Oh, somebody didn't configure it just right', is what the case was. Really didn't have any techs out there that couldn't get us up and going within a reasonable amount of time. Even the frame relay group that was doing the installation for the MPLS, there'd be some cases there where we may get transferred over to the frame relay group and they were just as knowledgeable on the IP side as frame relay, and they worked out well also. "