Eckoh, the UK’s largest provider of hosted speech recognition services, today announced a new five year contract with strategic US partner, Twenty First Century Communications Inc, (“TFCC”), for the delivery of automated power outage communications solutions into the UK utilities market. 

Since the strategic alliance was established in 2002, Eckoh and TFCC have successfully secured four substantive deals amongst some of the UK’s leading utilities, accounting for over 6.5 million of the UK’s 30 million electricity meters. TFCC provide a similar service to utility companies in the US which now covers over 70 million customer electricity meters and the expectations are that the UK service will experience strong growth over the contract period.

TFCC and Eckoh’s solution for the utilities sector is underpinned by TFCC’s industry-leading High Volume Call Answering service (HVCA®), which incorporates advanced speech recognition (“ASR”) technology from Eckoh. The service has been customised and consistently refined for the UK market over the past five years, giving customers the ability to inform their utilities provider when they are experiencing a power outage and to receive restoration updates on a 24/7 basis.

The solution provides callers with location specific restoration updates by identifying their exact location from their spoken post code, address and telephone number using Eckoh’s ASR. Other proven capabilities of the solution include an innovative call back capability, designed to confirm with customers when power has been restored in their local area.

All calls are hosted on Eckoh’s speech enabled, call processing platform, which has the capability of handling 650,000 calls an hour and 8,000 calls concurrently. The resilience of Eckoh’s hosted platform gives utilities organisations the confidence they need to manage high volumes of unpredictable call peaks, during even the most severe power outage periods.

Jim Hennigan, Executive Director, Eckoh said:
“The alliance with TFCC is a key strand of Eckoh's ongoing strategy to capitalise on growth from the speech solutions marketplace; we are delighted to extend our contract with them and are confident that the partnership will grow from strength to strength over the next five years as demand for speech based self service continues to gather momentum in the utilities sector".

Gerald Robertson, Chief Operating Officer, TFCC, added: 
“Eckoh’s longstanding expertise and their best of breed technology has made them the ideal partner to work with as we look to further expand our portfolio of communications self service solutions into the UK marketplace.”