For immediate release 12 June 2012
Eckoh plc
("Eckoh" or "the Company")
Eckoh wins multi-million pound contract with global financial services company
Eckoh plc (AIM: ECK), the UK's leading provider of speech recognition and associated payment solutions across voice, web and mobile channels, today announces that it has signed a new multi-million pound contract with a global financial services company to provide a dedicated VoiceXML telephony platform for handling their customer self-service enquiries from across the globe.
This renewal will commence immediately and run for an initial two year term with an option for a third year. The contract includes transactional commitments worth a minimum of £1.1 million per annum, representing a 17% increase on the minimum levels in the previous agreement.
Eckoh has been working with the organisation since 2008, hosting a range of automated services across all of their active European territories. Customers in these countries access the services by calling local telephone numbers. Their calls are then routed to the Eckoh hosted platform in the UK where they can select from a range of self-service customer care applications and if required, calls can be onward routed to contact centres anywhere around the globe.
New services have recently been launched in a number of countries outside Europe, in particular Australia and New Zealand, and it is anticipated that during the term of the contract further territories will be added. In addition, the hosted solution has historically only provided touch-tone based services, but it is anticipated that speech recognition services will commence in 2012.
Nik Philpot, Chief Executive Officer of Eckoh commented: "We are delighted to be continuing our relationship with such a significant global financial services client and that the solution we provide them is now extending beyond Europe. The initial contract was a period of transition for our client during which time they have transferred their legacy European operations onto our platform and I am pleased to say that we have proven to be 100% resilient in supporting these services. We look forward to delivering additional value as we utilise our speech recognition expertise to assist in the introduction of speech based services across multiple territories."
Enquiries:
Eckoh plc
Nik Philpot, Chief Executive Officer
Adam Moloney, Group Finance Director
www.eckoh.com Tel: 01442 458 300
Singer Capital Markets
Shaun Dobson Tel: 020 3205 7500
Buchanan
Jeremy Garcia, Nicola Cronk, Gabriella Clinkard Tel: 020 7466 5000
Notes to Editors:
About Eckoh plc
Eckoh plc (AIM: ECK) is the UK's leading provider of speech recognition and associated payment solutions across voice, web and mobile channels. We are a PCI DSS Level One accredited Service Provider, currently processing over £250 million in card payments annually.
Eckoh's solutions enable payments, transactions and enquiries to be processed without the caller needing to talk to a contact centre agent. This significantly reduces our clients' costs, whilst freeing up their agents to deal with more complex enquiries. Eckoh is the largest provider of such hosted services in the UK.
Our secure and resilient infrastructure has the scalability to handle up to 8,000 calls simultaneously, which means that calls will always be answered no matter how unpredictable the circumstances.
For more information, visit: www.eckoh.com