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Home arrow Investor Relations arrow RNS Announcements arrow 2004 arrow Eckoh and Twenty First Century Communications win
Eckoh and Twenty First Century Communications win    13/12/04 Print E-mail
Eckoh Technologies plc (“Eckoh”), one of Europe’s leading speech application service providers, and Twenty First Century Communications, Inc. (TFCC), today announced the launch of TFCC’s High Volume Call Answering (HVCA®) service for Northern Ireland Electricity (NIE). This is the start of a three-year contract to provide these services to NIE.

NIE is responsible for the regulated procurement, transmission, distribution and supply of electricity to 750,000 homes and businesses in Northern Ireland. It is the largest company within the Viridian Group plc.

TFCC currently serve over 70 US electric utility clients covering over 69 million customer meters in the North American marketplace. TFCC’s HVCA® service is the industry-leading power cut call handling solution. The HVCA® service has been developed and refined over 15 years and has been customised and re-deployed for the UK market supported by Eckoh who will exclusively host and manage the call handling platform on behalf of TFCC.

The HVCA® service will provide NIE with the ability to automatically process large volumes of calls resulting from power cuts. The service allows customers to inform NIE that they are experiencing a power cut, enables the capability of providing specific messages regarding the effected area, estimated restoration times by area, and includes call back options to confirm power restoration, as well as numerous other proven features. The service will utilize advanced speech recognition technology to identify the customers by their postcode, and is being rolled out in phases across NIE’s service territory beginning in December 2004.

Michael Skelton, Emergency Response Manager at Northern Ireland Electricity, comments: “We are delighted to be working with market leaders like TFCC and Eckoh in order to provide an improved customer experience. TFCC have extensive experience in High Volume Call Answering in the North American utilities marketplace, and Eckoh’s large hosted speech UK platform gives us the confidence that our customer’s power fault calls will be handled efficiently and professionally.”

Thomas Calabro, Senior Vice President for TFCC, comments: “We commend NIE for its leadership in being the first adopter in the UK of this best practice high volume call handling solution for power cuts. NIE has diligently selected the HVCA® service solution that combines TFCC’s market-leading proven performance in North America with Eckoh’s UK-leading capabilities for large hosted speech platforms.”

Jim Hennigan, Managing Director of Speech Solutions at Eckoh Technologies, comments: “We were extremely pleased to partner with TFCC in the UK marketplace, and are delighted at the partnership’s success in winning this significant contract 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 hosted services on this scale. TFCC have a proven track record in the US and we are looking forward to replicating that success in the UK with NIE and other utility clients.”

For further enquiries, please contact

Eckoh Technologies plc
Martin Turner, Chief Executive
Nik Philpot, Chief Operating Officer
Jim Hennigan, Managing Director, Speech Solutions
Tel: 08701 100 700

Buchanan Communications
Mark Edwards/Jeremy Garcia
Tel: 020 7466 5000
 
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