Eckoh plc ("Eckoh"), the UK's largest provider of hosted speech recognition services, today announced a new 3-year contract with Ideal Shopping Direct plc ("ISD"), one of the UK's largest digital retailers, for the provision of advanced speech recognition and interactive voice response (IVR) solutions for product ordering and customer service.

Following the competitive tender process ISD have re-appointed Eckoh as their exclusive network operator for inbound telephony services and have awarded Eckoh the new contract to be their exclusive supplier of automated solutions. Eckoh have worked with ISD since 2005 and they are one of Eckoh's largest speech solutions clients generating over 5 million calls per annum, and as such this new contract is a significant milestone in securing Eckoh's future speech solutions revenues.

ISD sells its products to consumers via the internet and its three television shopping channels Ideal World, Create and Craft and Vitality, which are broadcast to 86% of all UK households. The nature of ISD's business is that consumer demand can vary massively dependant on a particular product's popularity, the time of day and seasonality.

Currently telephone orders can be placed through either ISD's contact centre or a legacy IVR system with limited capacity which means that it is extremely difficult for ISD to process all orders quickly and efficiently in times of high demand. Once the new solution is deployed all telephone orders will be directed to the automated service which will be hosted on Eckoh's highly scalable call processing platform, which is capable of handling up to 8,000 callers simultaneously. This will allow all ISD customers to be serviced conveniently and quickly, with the contact centre providing additional support for any consumers who specifically require the services of a live agent.

The new Orderline solution that Eckoh are deploying will also streamline the process for the consumer and provide a more intuitive and personalised service based upon their preferences and previous order history. The new Customer Service solution will allow new customers to register more easily and will provide existing customers access to more detailed information on tracking their orders or refunds.

Nik Philpot, Eckoh's Chief Executive Officer commented:  "It's always pleasing to retain one of your most important clients but we're tremendously excited to have been selected to deliver such a business critical solution for Ideal Shopping. The success of their business is based on delivering a reliable, convenient and trustworthy service to their customers and we believe that our solutions will help position them as the outstanding market leader in this area."

Andrew Fryatt, ISD's Chief Executive Officer said: "Eckoh has a proven track record and reputation for delivering high quality, hosted automated solutions but we've also been tremendously impressed with their innovative and flexible approach to our business, which made our decision to select them an easy one. We have a clear strategy to improve the communication, information and service that we provide to our customers and we know that Eckoh will work in partnership with us to deliver on that goal over the next 3 years."