Eckoh is proud to have achieved recognition in the

2010 Best Companies to Work For guide

Eckoh, the UK’s largest provider of hosted speech recognition services, is proud to have achieved recognition as “One to Watch” in the 2010 Best Companies to Work For. Eckoh will be profiled within the ‘One to Watch’ section in the Best Companies Guide 2010, which is an annual reference guide that offers a unique insight into the UK’s top employers. This is the first year that Eckoh have participated in the project.

This year the Best Companies to Work For lists were derived from 1,086 entries, showing how high a priority staff engagement is. Of these, 773 made the grade. Best Companies surveyed all employees working within those organisations and carried out an evaluation of each organisation’s key statistics, processes and policies.

"This accolade is real recognition of the effort we put in to make sure we have a positive and open environment for our team," said Nik Philpot, Chief Executive Officer of Eckoh. "We are committed to analysing the data produced by the process and making further improvements to enable us to be classified within the top 100 companies in 2011, thus enhancing our ability to attract and retain the best talent available in our sector."

Best Companies has established its reputation through an authoritative and rigorous methodology. This methodology identifies workplace performance and best practice according to eight key factors: Leadership, My Manager, Personal Growth, Wellbeing, My Team, Giving Something Back, My Company and Fair Deal. These factors are particularly significant as they are defined through the results from the survey process and therefore by employees themselves as critical factors in workplace engagement.

Michele Griffiths, HR Manager at Eckoh, said: “We are delighted to be listed as a company to watch. We aim to create a welcoming and inspiring workplace for our staff and are really pleased that they enjoy working here. This is really positive feedback for us.”

This latest accomplishment follows Eckoh’s success in 2009, which saw a £1.5 million contract with a major Government Transport organisation go live in December 2009. The advanced speech recognition self-service application, deployed using Eckoh’s VoiceXML platform and Nuance Recognizer 9 software, forms an integral element of a 21st century multimedia contact centre solution for the client.

Being a ‘Best Company’ goes beyond the bottom line. It is about excelling in every area throughout the workplace and an organisation's commitment to its most important assets - its workforce. Focusing on employees brings real benefits such as improved workplace engagement, better staff retention, reduced recruitment costs and greater financial performance.

Jonathan Austin, Founder and CEO of Best Companies, comments: “We would like to congratulate Eckoh on their outstanding achievement. An engaged workforce is essential as organisations move out of the recession and into a more stable economic situation. No doubt many organisations have tackled redundancies and rapid change this year. But organisations like Eckoh that have kept on engaging their staff and making sure they are involved in the business will be in a good position for the future and should be congratulated for their efforts.”

Ends

Enquiries

Eckoh
Nik Philpot, Chief Executive Officer

Adam Moloney, Group Finance Director

www.eckoh.com

Tel: 01442 458 300

Corfin Communications

Harry Chathli, Claire Norbury

Tel: 020 7977 0020

Notes to Editors:

About Eckoh

Eckoh is the UK’s largest provider of hosted speech recognition services, with over 7 years of experience in successfully deploying speech solutions. These allow our clients to efficiently manage their contact centres by replacing the more repetitive calls with an effective and intuitive automated service. Our solutions address high volume service requests including billing queries, delivery tracking services, travel timetable checks or transactional payments at a fraction of the cost of a live agent and on a 24 hour a day basis.

Our carrier-grade platform has the scalability to handle over 650,000 calls an hour and up to 8,000 simultaneously. Our platform has the capacity to manage even the most dramatic and unexpected call peaks, making it the most scalable and flexible speech-enabled platform in Europe. All of our clients’ automation requirements; from speech, SMS, web to touch tone IVR are met via a single infrastructure, protecting them from the need for large scale technology investment – now or in the future.

Eckoh formed a strategic business alliance with BT in 2003. Working in partnership we have helped 20 clients across the financial services, government, utilities, retail & distribution, telecoms and travel & leisure sectors to transform their business operations through the introduction of hosted self-service solutions.

About Best Companies

Best Companies has been making an impact on workplace engagement since 2000. As the name behind The Sunday Times 100 Best Companies to Work For lists, Best Companies conducts the largest employee engagement survey in the world having received nearly one million survey responses from over 3000 different organisations.

Visit www.bestcompanies.co.uk

Accreditation

The Accreditation scheme, developed by Best Companies, is based on a star rating system where one star is first class, two stars are outstanding, and three stars are extraordinary. Organisational successes have been defined using data from the 2010 Best Companies to Work For survey which involved surveying 276,057 employees from the 1,086 companies that completed the accreditation process.

The Best Companies survey is designed to measure employee engagement and uses 70 questions to gain a comprehensive view of employee engagement across eight factors.

Every company that goes for Best Companies Accreditation is given a Best Companies Index score (BCI). This score (on a scale of 1 to 1000) is defined from employees’ responses to the sixteen key questions within the Best Companies survey. ‘Star Status’ is determined by the ‘BCI’ score and the specific cut-off points for One, Two, and Three Star Accreditation remain constant year on year.

Accreditation in 2010

This year, 1,086 organisations entered the Best Companies Accreditation. From these companies Best Companies received survey responses from over 257,513 employees since September.

Overall, 410 organisations achieved Star Status accreditation this year, and 50 organisations achieved Three Star Status, 140 organisations achieved Two Star Status, 220 organisations achieved One Star Status. In addition, 363 organisations achieved One To Watch Status.