GreenStone Farm Credit Services

Challenge

To fully transition to an integrated business operation and to unlock the full potential of their CRM, GreenStone needed to upgrade its company-wide network design and phone systems.

GreenStone’s growth, due in part to enfolding other Farm Credit Associations, required the company’s customer-facing employees to manage multiple applications in order to view customer accounts. This lack of centralized customer information translated into slow response times and incomplete information, a situation at odds with GreenStone’s commitment to outstanding customer care. In response, the company deployed a Microsoft® CRM application that provided a comprehensive view of each customer. While this implementation created significant improvements, it also pointed out the shortcomings of the company’s antiquated telecommunications capabilities. “Effectively, we had 37 disparate, disconnected telecom systems,” says Travis Vivian, GreenStone’s infrastructure manager. “We had different technologies, different capabilities and different maintenance contacts for each system.” To fully transition to an integrated business operation and to unlock the full potential of the CRM, GreenStone needed to upgrade its company-wide network design and phone systems.

Solution

A robust, converged voice and data network that would not only deliver greater bandwidth, but would also prioritize traffic—Qwest’s award-winning iQ Networking.

GreenStone met its objectives with a trio of solutions. The first was Microsoft’s next-generation CRM application. The company chose a Cisco® IP telephony system for its ability to interact and work with the CRM solution. And then, from among many strong competitors, they chose a single, robust, converged voice and data network that would not only deliver greater bandwidth, but would also prioritize traffic—Qwest’s award-winning iQ Networking, complete with private ports to all GreenStone locations.

A local systems integrator initially recommended that GreenStone talk to Renodis, a Qwest Business Partner. Renodis determined that Qwest iQ Networking® and the benefits of Qwest’s IP-based MPLS network were the ideal solution to accompany the Microsoft and Cisco elements. Qwest’s direct team joined the process, provisioning the host location in East Lansing, MI, with a full DS-3 with QoS, and all branch locations with DS-1s with QoS—giving GreenStone one of the finest cutting-edge WAN technologies in the marketplace. A new IT infrastructure was deployed at the GreenStone data center, with a backup environment located at a remote disaster recovery facility. Vice President of Information Services Nic Roberts remembers GreenStone’s cutover to the new Qwest network. “We still had a business to run. And we wanted to make sure we completed this WAN conversion before we completed our VoIP implementation, so we had a pretty aggressive timetable. We found Qwest to be extremely flexible around our timing, and we had a great conversion—it did not slow the business down at all. In fact, most of our branches realized real performance increases the very next day!” Roberts reports that because of their implementation of Qwest iQ Networking and its complementary solutions, GreenStone was “able to recognize about a 70 percent improvement in performance in terms of network traffic, which was just phenomenal to us. We have a faster network, a better network, a network that better poises us for the future, that allows us to roll out the technologies and the infrastructure we want—and our costs have stayed about the same.”

Client

Headquartered in East Lansing, GreenStone Farm Credit Services caters to the agricultural community throughout Michigan and in northeastern Wisconsin, providing financial services to some 17,000 customers. The cooperative is the state’s largest agricultural lender and America’s fourth-largest association in the National Farm Credit System. Operating out of 37 branch offices, GreenStone has experienced rapid growth in its role as a full-service financial-services partner, offering mortgages and other loans as well as providing assistance in areas including accounting services, tax preparation, building and equipment leases and life and crop insurance. The company also includes GreenStone – Capital Markets, which provides lending services to commercial producers and agribusiness.