Northern Ireland Electricity (NIE) has awarded Eckoh and strategic partner Twenty First Century Communications Inc (TFCC), a five-year contract extension for the delivery of an automated call handling solution to provide customers with around-the-clock information and service updates in the event of a power outage.

Launched in early 2005, the solution is underpinned by TFCC’s industry-leading High Volume Call Answering service (HVCA®), which incorporates advanced speech recognition technology from Eckoh. The service is one of the first automated solutions in the UK to use inbuilt adaptive personalisation scripting, enabling it to identify callers and tie them to a specific fault and its specific restoration estimate.  The system effectively answers large volumes of calls and presents them to NIE’s fault management 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 our customers with reliable access to power restoration information. TFCC and Eckoh’s hosted solution has allowed us to improve our overall service to customers and to streamline operational costs while boosting customer satisfaction. Their unique partnership approach means our solution has been continuously optimised, not only from their ability to bring the latest hosting technology benefits to bear, but also through their proactive working approach and expertise in this highly specialised sector.”

All calls to the service are hosted on Eckoh’s highly scalable self-service platform, which has the capability of handling 650,000 calls an hour and 8,000 calls concurrently. The vast scalability and resilience of Eckoh’s platform gives NIE the capability they need to manage the unpredictable volume of calls received, even during the most severe power outage periods.

Jim Hennigan, Executive Director of Eckoh added: “We are delighted at the partnership’s success in securing this significant contract extension with Northern Ireland Electricity. The ability to terminate large volumes of calls in the event of power cuts is only feasible via a large hosted solution like Eckoh’s, and reinforces our strategy of providing speech enabled hosted services on this scale.”

According to Tom Calabro, Senior Vice President, of Twenty First Century International Services LLC: “The NIE solution is a great success story and endorsement of the capability of hosted technology in a contact centre environment typically characterised by peaky, unpredictable call volumes. We are delighted that the solution has had such a positive impact, and we look forward to working with both NIE and the team at Eckoh to ensure a continued level of operational and service excellence over the next five years.”

Eckoh, the UK’s largest provider of speech recognition services has just signed a five year contract extension with TFCC, to deliver power outage communications solutions for utilities organisations across the UK. Since the strategic alliance was established in 2002, TFCC and Eckoh have successfully secured four substantive deals amongst some of the UK’s leading utilities, accounting for over 20% of UK electricity meters.