Contract Win

Eckoh Technologies PLC 13 December 2004 13 December 2004 Eckoh Technologies and Twenty First Century Communications win 3-year contract with Northern Ireland Electricity Eckoh Technologies plc ("Eckoh"), one of Europe's leading speech application service providers, and Twenty First Century Communications, Inc. (TFCC), today announced the launch of TFCC's High Volume Call Answering (HVCA(R)) service for Northern Ireland Electricity (NIE). This is the start of a three-year contract to provide these services to NIE. NIE is responsible for the regulated procurement, transmission, distribution and supply of electricity to 750,000 homes and businesses in Northern Ireland. It is the largest company within the Viridian Group plc. TFCC currently serve over 70 US electric utility clients covering over 69 million customer meters in the North American marketplace. TFCC's HVCA(R) service is the industry-leading power cut call handling solution. The HVCA(R) service has been developed and refined over 15 years and has been customised and re-deployed for the UK market supported by Eckoh who will exclusively host and manage the call handling platform on behalf of TFCC. The HVCA(R) service will provide NIE with the ability to automatically process large volumes of calls resulting from power cuts. The service allows customers to inform NIE that they are experiencing a power cut, enables the capability of providing specific messages regarding the effected area, estimated restoration times by area, and includes call back options to confirm power restoration, as well as numerous other proven features. The service will utilize advanced speech recognition technology to identify the customers by their postcode, and is being rolled out in phases across NIE's service territory beginning in December 2004. Michael Skelton, Emergency Response Manager at Northern Ireland Electricity, comments: "We are delighted to be working with market leaders like TFCC and Eckoh in order to provide an improved customer experience. TFCC have extensive experience in High Volume Call Answering in the North American utilities marketplace, and Eckoh's large hosted speech UK platform gives us the confidence that our customer's power fault calls will be handled efficiently and professionally." Thomas Calabro, Senior Vice President for TFCC, comments: "We commend NIE for its leadership in being the first adopter in the UK of this best practice high volume call handling solution for power cuts. NIE has diligently selected the HVCA(R) service solution that combines TFCC's market-leading proven performance in North America with Eckoh's UK-leading capabilities for large hosted speech platforms." Jim Hennigan, Managing Director of Speech Solutions at Eckoh Technologies, comments: "We were extremely pleased to partner with TFCC in the UK marketplace, and are delighted at the partnership's success in winning this significant contract 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 hosted services on this scale. TFCC have a proven track record in the US and we are looking forward to replicating that success in the UK with NIE and other utility clients." For further enquiries, please contact Eckoh Technologies plc Tel: 08701 100 700 Martin Turner, Chief Executive Nik Philpot, Chief Operating Officer Jim Hennigan, Managing Director, Speech Solutions Buchanan Communications Tel: 020 7466 5000 Mark Edwards/Jeremy Garcia Notes to Editors About Eckoh Technologies: Eckoh Technologies plc designs, builds, hosts and manages Speech Solutions for large corporations and organisations using ASR (Advanced Speech Recognition) and IVR (Interactive Voice Response) technologies. It is a leading UK service provider and infrastructure owner/operator, and intends to exploit the anticipated growth in demand for Speech Solutions across Europe. In January 2003, Eckoh signed a landmark deal to create an exclusive speech alliance with BT to provide hosted speech recognition solutions to their corporate client base over the next 2 years. This contract was then subsequently extended until December 2006. In December 2003, BT and Eckoh announced significant contracts to the value of £6m with UGC Cinemas, TD Waterhouse, RNIB and Wire-E. In June 2003 Eckoh enlarged its call processing infrastructure to 7,000 lines (capable of handling 500,000 calls an hour) by installing another platform into a BT hosting facility. This created the largest speech enabled call processing platform in Europe. In addition to those above, Eckoh has contracts to supply hosted Speech Solutions to clients including ATOC, Barclays, Virgin Mobile, William Hill, Wyevale Garden Centres and Vue. Eckoh also operates the following businesses: * IVR - following the acquisition of Intelliplus Group plc in Sept 2003, Eckoh is one of the largest providers of managed IVR and SMS services in the UK to media clients including the BBC, ITV, Trinity Mirror, Channel 4, Endemol, Celador, EMAP and Cartoon Network. * Network Services - under the "Symphony" and "Freecom" brands, Eckoh supplies fixed line and mobile telephony services, broadband and data services to SMEs in the UK and Ireland. Following the acquisition of Intelliplus Network Services now has an SME customer base of over 13,000. In the year to 31 March 2004 Eckoh Technologies plc generated a turnover of £62.5 million and had a cash balance of £10.2m. Further information can be found at www.eckoh.com. This information is provided by RNS The company news service from the London Stock Exchange

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