Contract Win

RNS Number : 0399W

Eckoh PLC

24 January 2012

 



For Immediate Release                                                                                                         24 January 2012

Eckoh plc

("Eckoh" or "the Company")

EckohPAY goes international with the award of a three year contract with VFS Global

Provision of trilingual Visa appointment booking service for nine countries

 

Eckoh (AIM: ECK), the UK's leading provider of customer service solutions using speech recognition, is pleased to announce the award of a three year contract with VFS Global ("VFS") in collaboration with its partner BT.

VFS provide a range of administration services on behalf of Embassies in relation to Visa applications, including checking applications and collecting Visa fees, through to submitting applications directly to the Embassy.

To support VFS, Eckoh has provided a PCI DSS compliant payment solution to collect payments from callers as part of the Embassy Visa appointment booking process. The service is currently available in three languages (English, Spanish and Arabic) and receives calls from nine countries being Ghana, Angola, USA, Ireland, Mexico, Chile, Venezuela, Bolivia and Qatar.

Applicants who call to book an Embassy appointment are answered by the contact centre operated by VFS on behalf of the Embassy. The VFS agent creates a client profile, reference number and agrees an appointment date and time, subject to payment. The agent advises the applicant of the payment amount in Euros and then passes the caller to EckohPAY to process the payment. The caller is validated against their reference number and date of birth, and then EckohPAY captures their card details in a PCI DSS compliant manner and carries out the card authorisation and settlement in real-time. On successful authorisation the VFS database is updated instantly, and the caller is passed back to the agent to complete the appointment booking.

The payment service was delivered in two weeks and went live, as planned, in mid-December 2011.

Nik Philpot, Chief Executive Officer of Eckoh says:

"This is an exciting new contract and is significant to Eckoh as we are providing a service to callers outside of Europe for the first time. Whilst the value of the contract is modest, it illustrates perfectly that our solutions have neither geographical or language constraints. VFS selected Eckoh not only for those reasons but also for our PCI DSS compliance and our ability to deploy this multilingual solution in such a short timescale."

PCI DSS is the payment card industry requirement for all organisations that store, process or transmit credit or debit cardholder data. It was developed by the founding payment brands of the PCI Security Standards Council, such as American Express, MasterCard Worldwide and Visa Inc., to facilitate the adoption of consistent data security measures on a global basis that ensure customer card information is managed securely through a complete and multifaceted array of security policies, practices and controls. Eckoh is a PCI DSS compliant Level One Service Provider and was accredited in July 2010 and then re-accredited in November 2011.

Ends

Enquiries:

Eckoh plc

Nik Philpot, Chief Executive Officer

Adam Moloney, Group Finance Director

www.eckoh.com                                                                        Tel: [phone]

Buchanan          

Jeremy Garcia, Nicola Cronk, Gabriella Clinkard                           Tel: [phone]

www.buchanan.uk.com

Singer Capital Markets

Shaun Dobson                                                                           Tel: [phone]

Notes to Editors:

About Eckoh plc

Eckoh plc (AIM: ECK) is the UK's leading provider of customer service solutions using speech recognition, and complementary services on the web and mobile.

Eckoh's solutions enable transactions, enquiries or payments to be processed without the caller needing to talk to a contact centre. This significantly reduces its clients' costs, whilst freeing up contact centre agents to deal with more complex enquiries. Eckoh is the largest provider of such hosted services in the UK.

Eckoh's secure and resilient infrastructure has the scalability to handle over 650,000 calls an hour and up to 8,000 calls simultaneously, which means calls can always be answered no matter how unpredictable the circumstances.

For more information, visit: www.eckoh.com

About VFS Global

VFS Global, a subsidiary of 104 year old Swiss multinational - Kuoni Group, is the world's largest and most experienced Outsourcing & Technology Service Specialists for Diplomatic Missions and Governments Worldwide. Established in 2001 as a specialist partner for diplomatic missions, VFS Global serves diplomatic missions/consular sections by managing all the administrative and non-judgmental tasks related to the entire lifecycle of a visa application process, enabling diplomatic missions to focus entirely on the key tasks of assessment and interview. Today it serves diplomatic missions of 35 countries through its 425(+) offices and has operations in 52 countries across 5 continents.

For more information, visit: www.vfsglobal.com/

 

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