SOS Wholesale Case Study

SOS are one of the UK’s largest discount cash and carry wholesalers. They came to Croft for support following migration from ISDN to SIP.

SOS Wholesale provide customers with a wide range of quality branded food, household goods and non-food items with a diverse portfolio of over 5,000 lines. As a family business, customer experience is paramount to SOS and the service they deliver. We were contacted by SOS and later acquired the support agreement for SOS voice and data in 2017, with the aim of improving the service they were currently experiencing following a transition to SIP.

The Challenge

SOS had migrated from ISDN to SIP with another supplier. They were experiencing a lot of the common issues encountered when voice traffic is not prioritised correctly on the data network. As a result, they were faced with dropped calls, poor speech quality and no explanation as to why.

Croft faced the challenge of taking over an existing implementation and reverse engineering the configuration, while linking their Derby HQ to their Barnsley sales office and increasing WAN reliability at both sites. Changing SOS’s overall perception of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) served as our objective at the core of these challenges.

The Solution

With the implementation of faster internet circuits and network management policies we were able to remove these issues entirely. Solutions included:

• 3CX re-installed and re-programmed at Derby HQ to optimise performance and provide the end user with the features they were promised
• Barnsley sales office set up with their own 3CX instance
• Derby and Barnsley offices networked together to provide extension visibility between nodes
• Cisco Meraki Security gateways
• Client VPN connectivity
• New internet circuits providing redundancy and load balancing
• Prioritised Voice traffic to alleviate SIP issues left by previous supplier

I highly recommend Croft, we have been using them for years. We left briefly to go with another firm, we didn’t even see the contract out before we went back with Croft as the service is second to none and the team are friendly and informative, they always provide excellent and speedy service, you really can’t go wrong with these guys.

Lee Morgan
IT Manager, SOS Wholesale

The Results

As a result of our implemented solutions, SOS were left with a vastly improved communications platform providing them with enhanced flexibility, management, reporting & performance.

Faster internet circuits were implemented with added failover and security gateways operated with improved performance, redundancy, visibility and features with extension visibility now present between nodes.

Finally, we were able to turn SOS’s bad experience and perception of VoIP into a positive one.