ECKOH AWARDED THREE YEAR CONTRACT EXTENSION WITH O2

Eckoh plc (“Eckoh”), the UK’s largest provider of hosted speech recognition services, today announced a three year contract extension for the provisioning components of O2’s Age Verification and Parental Control solutions, using advanced self-service technology. Under the terms of the new contract, Eckoh will supplement the automated telephone based service with an equivalent web based offering, providing O2 customers with extended self-service options and 24/7 channel choice.
 
The contract renewal follows on from Eckoh’s successful management of the Age Verification and Parental Control provisioning services since 2004. Both services are key components of O2’s infrastructure developments designed to ensure that only customers over the age of 18 can access commercial content services classified as 18, and to offer parents a robust method of restricting access to internet sites on their child’s mobile. 

Both telephone and web based self-service components will be managed from Eckoh’s highly scalable and fully resilient self-service platform, which is capable of handling 650,000 calls an hour and 8,000 calls simultaneously. The use of web based technologies and techniques, form an integral part of the extended solution, drawing upon Eckoh’s substantial web design and deployment heritage.

Eckoh’s browser-based business intelligence system will further enable O2 to directly monitor call and web statistics measured by volume, type of request and time of day, as well as the ability to track customer channel usage and service performance on a real-time basis.
 
Jim Hennigan, Executive Director, Eckoh commented:
“The extension of our agreement with O2 is a clear indication of their long term commitment to both Eckoh and the advanced self-service solution, which has proved so fundamental to this important service. The new web based capability will form an integral part of O2’s enhanced solution, providing customers with an even more comprehensive and convenient self-service offering as well as extended 24/7 channel choice.”

Jonny Shipp, Head of Content Standards at O2, said:
 “The age verification service is one of the core elements of our programme to restrict children’s access to inappropriate content and give parents more control and greater peace of mind. Over the past 3 years, Eckoh has demonstrated its capability as a service provider that has the necessary expertise and technical infrastructure to deliver an extremely robust solution. We are confident that the extended web capability will provide our customers with an even more convenient service whilst ensuring a high level of consistency across our contact channels, whether web or telephone based. “

More about Parental Control and Age Verification Provisioning Services:
The Parental Control provisioning establishes the profile of the handset by automatically capturing the customer’s mobile number, which is then verified with O2’s internal systems. On validation of customer details, the user is prompted to select a PIN number, which they can use to enable or disable the controls on their handset.

Age Verification establishes the profile of the handset by automatically capturing the customer’s mobile number, which is then verified with O2’s internal systems. On validation of customer details, the user is advised of the charges to activate Age Verification and taken through a secure credit card module. If the user chooses to switch Open Access off, then they are advised that Age Verification will be de-activated in the next hour and a text message will be sent to confirm same.

Both services offer peace of mind to parents wishing to protect their children whilst online.

For further enquiries, please contact:

Eckoh plc 
Nik Philpot, Chief Executive Officer
Adam Moloney, Group Finance Director
Jim Hennigan, Executive Director 

www.eckoh.com
Tel: 01442 458 300
 
Corfin Communications 
Harry Chathli, Neil Thapar, Ben Hunt
Tel: 020 7929 8989
 
Seymour Pierce 
Jonathan Wright
Tel: 020 7107 8050