Scottrade Enhances Customer Service with WAN Improvements
Scottrade has hatched an aggressive plan to boost its branch network to 500 offices by 2010. To support that plan, however, the discount brokerage needed to upgrade its legacy voice and data private network. The firm turned to Qwest Communications' iQ Networking Private Port service, a multiprotocol label switching (MPLS)-based wide area networking (WAN) solution that links Scottrade's St. Louis headquarters with its branches.
"We are extending the capabilities and knowledge base out to the branches," says Ian Patterson, Scottrade's CIO. "And we couldn't have done it without putting the MPLS network in place, because it's all about bandwidth."
Scottrade's branches are the lifeline to its customers, explains Patterson. So when clients telephone the customer service 800 number, "You're redirected to your local branch and the person you know," he says. Likewise, the branch employees are there to help any walk-in traffic that requires assistance.
The increased bandwidth from the network implementation, plus the quality of service (QoS) technology Qwest offers on top of it — which diagnoses the data flow coming across the network and makes decisions on what requires the biggest bandwidth — have improved the branches' service capabilities, Patterson reports. "It really comes down to faster demos, faster workflow and a lower cost for the operation," he says.
Scottrade also is leveraging the new bandwidth to distribute internal training materials. For example, the brokerage streams a lot of video, such as monthly messages from the chief executive, out to branches, Patterson relates. In addition, the firm is leveraging wikis to enable the experts in the company — who may be out in a branch — to post updates to many of its operations manuals.
"We wouldn't have been able to do that and still kept the rest of the standard traffic of day-to-day operations out at the branches if we hadn't put the MPLS network in place to give us that bandwidth capability," says Patterson. "And that all drops down to the bottom line of supporting the customer better."
Improved Business Continuity
Another crucial benefit is that the firm's backup and recovery infrastructure is stronger with the new network, notes Patterson. In particular, by working in partnership with Qwest and Cisco Systems, Scottrade has enabled its encryption technology to work in better conjunction with the firm's disaster recovery and business continuity solutions.
"If I have a blip in the network or an outage at my data center and I need to flip to my backup recovery center, the router is going to know what has happened. But how does the firewall device know it's not getting blasted with some kind of intrusion?" says Patterson. "With the new system we've put in place, that process is automated."
Indeed, the partnership approach Qwest offered was a big factor in choosing the vendor, according to Patterson. On top of the 15 percent annual growth in branches, Scottrade also moves 10 to 20 branches each year as it seeks out better locations for facilities, so managing the rollout process was critical.
According to Martin Capurro, director of global product management for IP services at Qwest, one of the firm's competitive differentiators is its project management capability, which helps coordinate the transition of all of a customer's sites. He contends that the service helps customers better address some of the hidden costs, such as running duplicate networks during the transition.
"Budgets are tight out there, and the reality is no one gets rewarded for bringing unbudgeted costs to the table," Capurro says. "That is important in helping customers make the decision [to invest in implementing our product]."
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