Five year Contract Extension

Eckoh PLC
09 January 2008





9 January 2008


   ECKOH AND TFCC ANNOUNCE FIVE YEAR CONTRACT EXTENSION WITH NORTHERN IRELAND
          ELECTRICITY FOR AUTOMATED POWER OUTAGE CALL HANDLING SOLUTION

Northern Ireland Electricity (NIE) has awarded Eckoh and strategic partner
Twenty First Century Communications Inc (TFCC), a five-year contract extension
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.

Launched in early 2005, the solution is underpinned by TFCC's industry-leading
High Volume Call Answering service (HVCA(R)), which incorporates advanced speech
recognition technology from Eckoh.

The service is one of the first automated solutions in the UK to use inbuilt
adaptive personalisation scripting, enabling it to identify callers and tie them
to a specific fault and its specific restoration estimate. The system
effectively answers large volumes of calls and presents them to NIE's fault
management system, on a real time basis.

Stephen Harper, NIE Distribution Service Centre Manager commented:
'Since we launched the service three years ago, we have been able to provide our
customers with reliable access to power restoration information. TFCC and
Eckoh's hosted solution has allowed us to improve our overall service to
customers and to streamline operational costs while boosting customer
satisfaction. Their unique partnership approach means our solution has been
continuously optimised, not only from their ability to bring the latest hosting
technology benefits to bear, but also through their proactive working approach
and expertise in this highly specialised sector.'

All calls to the service are hosted on Eckoh's highly scalable self-service
platform, which has the capability of handling 650,000 calls an hour and 8,000
calls concurrently. The vast scalability and resilience of Eckoh's platform
gives NIE the capability they need to manage the unpredictable volume of calls
received, even during the most severe power outage periods.

Jim Hennigan, Executive Director of Eckoh added: 'We are delighted at the
partnership's success in securing this significant contract extension 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 speech enabled hosted services
on this scale.'

According to Tom Calabro, Senior Vice President, of Twenty First Century
International Services LLC: 'The NIE solution is a great success story and
endorsement of the capability of hosted technology in a contact centre
environment typically characterised by peaky, unpredictable call volumes. We are
delighted that the solution has had such a positive impact, and we look forward
to working with both NIE and the team at Eckoh to ensure a continued level of
operational and service excellence over the next five years.'

Eckoh, the UK's largest provider of speech recognition services has just signed
a five year contract extension with TFCC, to deliver power outage communications
solutions for utilities organisations across the UK. Since the strategic
alliance was established in 2002, TFCC and Eckoh have successfully secured four
substantive deals amongst some of the UK's leading utilities, accounting for
over 20% of UK electricity meters.

                                   Ends


For further enquiries, please contact:

Eckoh plc
Nik Philpot, Chief Executive Officer                 Tel: [phone]
Adam Moloney, Group Finance Director
Jim Hennigan, Executive Director
www.eckoh.com

Corfin Communications
Harry Chathli / Neil Thapar                          Tel: [phone]

Seymour Pierce
Jonathan Wright / Parimal Kumar                      Tel: [phone]


About Eckoh

Eckoh is the UK's largest provider of hosted speech recognition services and
sets the standard for outsourced automated solutions across Europe. Eckoh
enables its clients to communicate more effectively and to enhance their
profitability, while making life better for the people who use their services.

Eckoh provides automated services in virtually every industry sector for clients
including TD Waterhouse, Vue Cinemas, William Hill, O2, Ideal Shopping Direct,
DEFRA, The London Stock Exchange, the COI, National Rail Enquiries, AXA PPP
healthcare, BSkyB, Parcelforce Worldwide, BAA, Barclays Stockbrokers, United
Utilities and Scottish Power.

Eckoh is also a market leader in providing interactive services to large media
owners and has amongst its clients Trinity Mirror, the largest newspaper
publisher, IPC, the leading consumer magazines group and Bauer, the largest
privately owned publisher in Europe.

In 2003, Eckoh formed a strategic alliance with BT to capitalise on the growing
opportunity for speech recognition services in the corporate marketplace. The
alliance, which was extended in July 2005 until 2010, has supplied speech
services to over 25 clients. The combined strengths of both parties have created
an unrivalled and value-added speech proposition and clients of the alliance
include: National Rail Enquiries, AXA PPP healthcare, Parcelforce Worldwide,
Barclays Stockbrokers, TD Waterhouse, NIE, Enterprise Rent-A-Car and Three
Valleys Water.

Eckoh has a call processing platform of 10,000 lines (capable of handling over
650,000 calls an hour) of which over 8,000 lines incorporate speech recognition
technology making it one of the largest speech enabled call processing platforms
in Europe.

In the first half of the financial year ending September 2007 Eckoh generated a
turnover of £18 million and had cash balances of £5.7m. Further information can
be found at www.eckoh.com.



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