Five year Contract Extension

9 Jan 2008 07:01

Eckoh PLC09 January 2008 9 January 2008 ECKOH AND TFCC ANNOUNCE FIVE YEAR CONTRACT EXTENSION WITH NORTHERN IRELAND ELECTRICITY FOR AUTOMATED POWER OUTAGE CALL HANDLING SOLUTION Northern Ireland Electricity (NIE) has awarded Eckoh and strategic partnerTwenty First Century Communications Inc (TFCC), a five-year contract extensionfor the delivery of an automated call handling solution to provide customerswith around-the-clock information and service updates in the event of a poweroutage. Launched in early 2005, the solution is underpinned by TFCC's industry-leadingHigh Volume Call Answering service (HVCA(R)), which incorporates advanced speechrecognition technology from Eckoh. The service is one of the first automated solutions in the UK to use inbuiltadaptive personalisation scripting, enabling it to identify callers and tie themto a specific fault and its specific restoration estimate. The systemeffectively answers large volumes of calls and presents them to NIE's faultmanagement system, on a real time basis. Stephen Harper, NIE Distribution Service Centre Manager commented:"Since we launched the service three years ago, we have been able to provide ourcustomers with reliable access to power restoration information. TFCC andEckoh's hosted solution has allowed us to improve our overall service tocustomers and to streamline operational costs while boosting customersatisfaction. Their unique partnership approach means our solution has beencontinuously optimised, not only from their ability to bring the latest hostingtechnology benefits to bear, but also through their proactive working approachand expertise in this highly specialised sector." All calls to the service are hosted on Eckoh's highly scalable self-serviceplatform, which has the capability of handling 650,000 calls an hour and 8,000calls concurrently. The vast scalability and resilience of Eckoh's platformgives NIE the capability they need to manage the unpredictable volume of callsreceived, even during the most severe power outage periods. Jim Hennigan, Executive Director of Eckoh added: "We are delighted at thepartnership's success in securing this significant contract extension withNorthern Ireland Electricity. The ability to terminate large volumes of calls inthe event of power cuts is only feasible via a large hosted solution likeEckoh's, and reinforces our strategy of providing speech enabled hosted serviceson this scale." According to Tom Calabro, Senior Vice President, of Twenty First CenturyInternational Services LLC: "The NIE solution is a great success story andendorsement of the capability of hosted technology in a contact centreenvironment typically characterised by peaky, unpredictable call volumes. We aredelighted that the solution has had such a positive impact, and we look forwardto working with both NIE and the team at Eckoh to ensure a continued level ofoperational and service excellence over the next five years." Eckoh, the UK's largest provider of speech recognition services has just signeda five year contract extension with TFCC, to deliver power outage communicationssolutions for utilities organisations across the UK. Since the strategicalliance was established in 2002, TFCC and Eckoh have successfully secured foursubstantive deals amongst some of the UK's leading utilities, accounting forover 20% of UK electricity meters. Ends For further enquiries, please contact: Eckoh plcNik Philpot, Chief Executive Officer Tel: 01442 458 300Adam Moloney, Group Finance DirectorJim Hennigan, Executive Directorwww.eckoh.com Corfin CommunicationsHarry Chathli / Neil Thapar Tel: 020 7977 0020 Seymour PierceJonathan Wright / Parimal Kumar Tel: 020 7107 8000 About Eckoh Eckoh is the UK's largest provider of hosted speech recognition services andsets the standard for outsourced automated solutions across Europe. Eckohenables its clients to communicate more effectively and to enhance theirprofitability, while making life better for the people who use their services. Eckoh provides automated services in virtually every industry sector for clientsincluding TD Waterhouse, Vue Cinemas, William Hill, O2, Ideal Shopping Direct,DEFRA, The London Stock Exchange, the COI, National Rail Enquiries, AXA PPPhealthcare, BSkyB, Parcelforce Worldwide, BAA, Barclays Stockbrokers, UnitedUtilities and Scottish Power. Eckoh is also a market leader in providing interactive services to large mediaowners and has amongst its clients Trinity Mirror, the largest newspaperpublisher, IPC, the leading consumer magazines group and Bauer, the largestprivately owned publisher in Europe. 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. 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. In the first half of the financial year ending September 2007 Eckoh generated aturnover of £18 million and had cash balances of £5.7m. Further information canbe found at www.eckoh.com. This information is provided by RNS The company news service from the London Stock Exchange