A Lasting Relationship with Lumen Drives Reliability, Connectivity and Growth at CJRW

At Arkansas-based advertising agency CJRW, great customer service begins and ends with reliable connectivity.

“The main customer experience we have here is to try to keep the internet and phones up and running,” says CJRW IT Director Bob Johnston.

Since 1961, CJRW has provided full-service advertising, PR and media services to clients large and small across the country. They have more than 100 clients, including Oaklawn Casino Resort, Arkansas Scholarship Lottery and the Arkansas Department of Parks, Heritage, and Tourism.

With such a diverse client base, a robust IT infrastructure is critical to keeping operations running smoothly. CJRW’s long-standing relationship with Lumen helps them do exactly that.

Finding scalable internet solutions to enable company growth

Frequent downtimes with their previous internet service provider had Johnston and his team looking for a better option.

At the time, CJRW was growing, but IT challenges disrupted their operations. The agency had acquired a local video production house and wanted to add them to the existing internal network, which would provide access to their file server and internal email. Making this goal a reality required a reliable and secure network solution that could connect multiple offices and provide uninterrupted service.

Expansion uncovered other needs as well. The primary files that CJRW sends and receives from clients are commonly high-end video files, which can be many gigabytes, or numerous 50- to 100-megabyte high-resolution photographs. A secure connection that could handle the enormous files was essential if the company was going to continue providing clients with the outstanding service they’d come to expect.

Lumen came recommended by a CJRW client who’d had a positive experience with the company. Lumen helped CJRW set up a point-to-point private line between their new production house and their existing office.

The point-to-point private lines provided two benefits, the first being that the connection is private and isn’t traveling over the open internet through a VPN. Additionally, the bandwidth between offices is better than what the agency would have had if it had implemented encryption.

Since developing that initial project, CJRW has trusted Lumen and its internet services. The ongoing partnership has contributed to CJRW’s success, offering growth opportunities that might not otherwise exist.

Peace of Mind with a Trusted Partner

One of the biggest benefits of partnering with Lumen is time savings. The team doesn’t have to deal with outages or unhappy customers, so they can focus on initiatives that can move the business forward. The uptime and reliability of Lumen have taken a lot of stress and headaches off the leadership’s plate, and they don’t have to worry about connectivity.

CJRW’s customers benefit from the secure and reliable service, which helps build and maintain trust in the company. They will always be able to answer the phone if a customer calls, and they can pass data files back and forth numerous times without interruption.

CJRW recently doubled their bandwidth from 500 MB to 1 GB to improve their ability to send and receive large files and high-resolution images. This and other upgrades provide a good launch pad for further modernization efforts and recommendations.

“The biggest positive experience I have is the uptime and reliability,” Johnston says. “I can’t count more than four or five times over the 20 years we’ve been with Lumen that we’ve ever had an outage or other major problem.”

CJRW’s long-term relationship with Lumen Technologies underscores the value of reliable IT infrastructure in the advertising industry. “I’ve recommended Lumen Technologies probably 50 times over the years to my friends who run businesses or hold IT positions, and I will continue to recommend Lumen,” says Johnston. Reliability is king, and Lumen continues to deliver the reliability CJRW needs to thrive.

To hear more about how Lumen customers made their businesses more robust and secure, check out more customer success stories.

Current Lumen customer compensated for their endorsement.

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