Eckoh and Twenty First Century Communications win three-year contract with United Utilities for advanced power outage communications solution

United Utilities, one of the UK’s leading providers of electricity services, has selected Eckoh plc (“Eckoh”) and Twenty First Century Communications, Inc. (“TFCC”), for the delivery of an automated call handling solution to provide customers with around-the-clock information and service updates in the event of a power outage.

Eckoh, the UK’s largest provider of hosted speech recognition services, has an exclusive alliance with TFCC to deliver power outage communications solutions for utilities organisations across the UK.  This is the fourth substantive deal for the Eckoh and TFCC partnership, which when United Utilities is added will cover over 6.5 million of the UK’s 30 million electricity meters.

The United Utilities solution will be underpinned by TFCC’s industry-leading High Volume Call Answering service (HVCA®), which incorporates advanced speech recognition technology from Eckoh. The service, which has been customised and consistently refined for the UK market over the past three years, will give customers the ability to inform United Utilities when they are experiencing a power outage and to receive restoration updates on a 24/7 basis.

Thanks to Eckoh’s advanced speech recognition technology, the service will provide callers with location specific restoration updates, by capturing the caller’s spoken post code, address and entered telephone number. Other proven features of the service include an innovative call back capability, designed to confirm with customers when power has been restored in their local area.

All calls to the service will be hosted on Eckoh’s highly scaleable self-service platform, which has the capability of handling 650,000 calls an hour and 8,000 calls concurrently. The vast scalability of Eckoh’s platform gives United Utilities the critical reassurance they need to manage the unpredictable volume of calls received, even during severe power outage periods.

Sally Ainsworth, Electricity Business Customer Services Manager, United Utilities commented:
“By leveraging TFCC and Eckoh’s proven track record and highly specialised expertise, we look forward to setting our customer service bar even higher and to driving home real business innovation and operational benefits to our organisation as a whole.”

Jim Hennigan, Executive Director, Eckoh said:
“We are delighted to win this significant contract with one of the UK’s leading utilities companies. I believe that our repeat business success is further testament to the utility industry’s growing appetite for telephone-based self-service solutions that have the ability to provide a 24/7 level of telephone service that customers have come to appreciate and to simply expect.”

Tom Calabro, Senior Vice President, TFCC, added:  “Eckoh has been an ideal partner to work with as we continue to attract and retain important large UK clients for our portfolio of highly specialised proven services.  United Utilities has impressed us with its commitment to adopt best practices and we greatly appreciate the opportunity to work with them to deliver ongoing improvements in service to its customers.” 

Eckoh estimates that the market for automated speech solutions within the UK utilities industry will be worth around £3m in 2008, and will grow at a CAGR of between 25 and 30% between now and the end of the decade.

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