ILS Promotions Centralizes Multinational Operations and Reduces Telemarketing Costs Over 50%

The OffShore Challenge
ILS Promotions is one of the UK's leading distributors of fine Asian textiles. The Bradford-based company wanted to initiate a major telesales initiative to promote its offerings and develop closer relationships with its 300 specialized retailers throughout the country, as well as to potentially expand that customer base. Because office and HR costs in the UK were prohibitive, ILS decided to investigate the possibility of setting up its call center in Sri Lanka. In addition to slashing its operational costs, a Sri Lankan call center would also allow ILS to staff the center with Asian textile experts.

The problem, of course, was that the higher telecom charges would completely negate the cost savings and other advantages offered by situating the call center in Sri Lanka. So the company had to find a way to eliminate those charges.

The VoIP Solution
The obvious solution was to use VoIP in order to bypass conventional carrier long-distance charges between the Sri Lanka call center and the company's UK customers. The more difficult question was exactly how to implement VoIP in order to secure the necessary savings while ensuring call quality. ILS also had to make sure that the solution was not overly burdensome to implement or manage over time.

Sanjay Penerrera, director of ILS's communications group, was charged with investigating the company's VoIP options. His research quickly led him to US-based Quintum Technologies, whose Tenor switches offered simple, cost-effective VoIP implementation and a variety of unique technical capabilities. Quintum, in turn, directed him to its UK partner Techland Group, which could provide him with the local support and integration expertise that ILS required.

The solution that Techland suggested – and that ILS adopted – was to deploy a single Quintum Tenor Analog VoIP switch in Colombo, Sri Lanka. The switch could handle the 700 calls that the call center's eight call center operators made each day to the UK. No PBX or switchboard was installed at the call center. Instead, the phones were connected directly to the Tenor switch.

Thanks to Quintum's PacketSaver™ compression software, calls from all of the company's operators in Sri Lanka can be multiplexed into a single IP packet for their journey over the Internet to the UK. This allows ILS to use a mere 128k Internet connection to support all of its voice traffic. Use of such a small and inexpensive connection is also made possible by the fact that the link is dedicated to voice and doesn't have to carry any data. ILS does not have to use any additional bandwidth or network management tools to support its VoIP solution.

Calls from Sri Lanka are terminated in the UK at a managed Quintum Tenor CMS carrier-class switch situated at Telehouse in London. From there, the calls are routed over specially negotiated low-cost PSTN lines to the called party.



Remarkably, the entire solution took only one week to set up – including the two days needed for travel between the UK and Sri Lanka.

Round trip call delay over the Internet is less than 500ms, and call quality is consistently excellent. In fact, the solution has been so successful that a second Tenor switch has been installed in Colombo so that sixteen operators can now make approximately 2600 call per day.

The Bottom Line Benefits
The impact on the business has been significant. ILS is selling more product to more retailers than ever, and plans to further expand its call center capacity. With the reduced operational and telecom costs, the investment in Quintum's easy-to-deploy VoIP technology has paid for itself in just a few months.

"Quintum's VoIP technology has completely revolutionized our business," Penerrera declares. "By enabling us to set up our offshore call center, our Tenor-based telecom system has enabled us to build much stronger relationships with our existing retailers and initiate relationships with new ones – all without straining our capital or human resources."

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