21st Century Extends Contract

5 Dec 2007 07:01

Eckoh PLC05 December 2007 Eckoh PLC 5th December Twenty First Century Communications Inc extends the strategic alliance targeting UK utilities with Eckoh until May 2013 Eckoh, the UK's largest provider of hosted speech recognition services, todayannounced a new five year contract with strategic US partner, Twenty FirstCentury Communications Inc, ("TFCC"), for the delivery of automated power outagecommunications solutions into the UK utilities market. Since the strategic alliance was established in 2002, Eckoh and TFCC havesuccessfully secured four substantive deals amongst some of the UK's leadingutilities, accounting for over 6.5 million of the UK's 30 million electricitymeters. TFCC provide a similar service to utility companies in the US which nowcovers over 70 million customer electricity meters and the expectations are thatthe UK service will experience strong growth over the contract period. TFCC and Eckoh's solution for the utilities sector is underpinned by TFCC'sindustry-leading High Volume Call Answering service (HVCA(R)), whichincorporates advanced speech recognition ("ASR") technology from Eckoh. Theservice has been customised and consistently refined for the UK market over thepast five years, giving customers the ability to inform their utilities providerwhen they are experiencing a power outage and to receive restoration updates ona 24/7 basis. The solution provides callers with location specific restoration updates byidentifying their exact location from their spoken post code, address andtelephone number using Eckoh's ASR. Other proven capabilities of the solutioninclude an innovative call back capability, designed to confirm with customerswhen power has been restored in their local area. All calls are hosted on Eckoh's speech enabled, call processing platform, whichhas the capability of handling 650,000 calls an hour and 8,000 callsconcurrently. The resilience of Eckoh's hosted platform gives utilitiesorganisations the confidence they need to manage high volumes of unpredictablecall peaks, during even the most severe power outage periods. Jim Hennigan, Executive Director, Eckoh said:"The alliance with TFCC is a key strand of Eckoh's ongoing strategy tocapitalise on growth from the speech solutions marketplace; we are delighted toextend our contract with them and are confident that the partnership will growfrom strength to strength over the next five years as demand for speech basedself service continues to gather momentum in the utilities sector". Gerald Robertson, Chief Operating Officer, TFCC, added:"Eckoh's longstanding expertise and their best of breed technology has made themthe ideal partner to work with as we look to further expand our portfolio ofcommunications self service solutions into the UK marketplace." Ends Enquiries: Eckoh plcNik Philpot + 44 1442 458 300Adam MoloneyJim Hennigan Corfin CommunicationsHarry Chathli, Neil Thapar + 44 20 7977 0020 Seymour PierceJonathan Wright/Parimal Kumar + 44 20 7107 8000 About Eckoh Eckoh is the UK's largest provider of hosted speech recognition services. Eckohenables its clients to communicate more effectively and to enhance theirprofitability, whilst making life better for the people who use their services. Eckoh provides automated services in virtually every industry sector for clientsincluding Vue Cinemas, William Hill, O2, Ideal Shopping Direct, DEFRA, TheLondon Stock Exchange, National Rail Enquiries, AXA PPP healthcare, BSkyB,Parcelforce Worldwide, BAA, Barclays Stockbrokers, TD Waterhouse, UnitedUtilities, Scottish Power and NIE (Northern Ireland Electricity). Eckoh is also a market leader in providing interactive services to large mediaowners and has amongst its clients ITV, the UK's largest commercial broadcaster,Trinity Mirror, the largest newspaper publisher and IPC, the leading consumermagazines group. In 2003, Eckoh formed a strategic alliance with BT to capitalise on the growingopportunity for speech recognition services in the corporate marketplace. Thealliance, which was extended in July 2005 until 2010, has supplied speechservices to over 25 clients generating more than 55 million minutes of speechself-service transactions. The combined strengths of both parties have createdan unrivalled and value-added speech proposition and clients of the allianceinclude: National Rail Enquiries, AXA PPP healthcare, Parcelforce Worldwide,Barclays Stockbrokers, TD Waterhouse, NIE, Enterprise Rent-A-Car and ThreeValleys Water. Eckoh has a call processing platform of 10,000 lines (capable of handling over650,000 calls an hour) of which over 8,000 lines incorporate speech recognitiontechnology making it one of the largest speech enabled call processing platformsin Europe. Further information can be found at www.eckoh.com. This information is provided by RNS The company news service from the London Stock Exchange