Eckoh Wins New 3 year Contract with IDS

3rd June 2008

Ideal Shopping Direct plc ("ISD"), one of the UK's largest digital retailers, today announced a new 3-year contract with Eckoh plc ("Eckoh"), the UK's largest provider of hosted speech recognition services, for the provision of advanced speech recognition and interactive voice response (IVR) solutions for product ordering and customer service.

Following the competitive tender process ISD have re-appointed Eckoh as their exclusive network operator for inbound telephony services and have awarded Eckoh the new contract to be their exclusive supplier of automated solutions. Eckoh have worked with ISD since 2005 and they are one of Eckoh's largest speech solutions clients generating over 5 million calls per annum, and as such this new contract is a significant milestone in securing Eckoh's future speech solutions revenues.

ISD sells its products to consumers via the internet and its three television shopping channels Ideal World, Create and Craft and Vitality, which are broadcast to 86% of all UK households. The nature of ISD's business is that consumer demand can vary massively dependant on a particular product's popularity, the time of day and seasonality.

Currently telephone orders can be placed through either ISD's contact centre or a legacy IVR system with limited capacity which means that it is extremely difficult for ISD to process all orders quickly and efficiently in times of high demand. Once the new solution is deployed all telephone orders will be directed to the automated service which will be hosted on Eckoh's highly scalable call processing platform, which is capable of handling up to 8,000 callers simultaneously. This will allow all ISD customers to be serviced conveniently and quickly, with the contact centre providing additional support for any consumers who specifically require the services of a live agent.

The new Orderline solution that Eckoh are deploying will also streamline the process for the consumer and provide a more intuitive and personalised service based upon their preferences and previous order history. The new Customer Service solution will allow new customers to register more easily and will provide existing customers access to more detailed information on tracking their orders or refunds.

Nik Philpot, Eckoh's Chief Executive Officer commented: "It's always pleasing to retain one of your most important clients but we're tremendously excited to have been selected to deliver such a business critical solution for Ideal Shopping. The success of their business is based on delivering a reliable, convenient and trustworthy service to their customers and we believe that our solutions will help position them as the outstanding market leader in this area."

Andrew Fryatt, ISD's Chief Executive Officer said: "Eckoh has a proven track record and reputation for delivering high quality, hosted automated solutions but we've also been tremendously impressed with their innovative and flexible approach to our business, which made our decision to select them an easy one. We have a clear strategy to improve the communication, information and service that we provide to our customers and we know that Eckoh will work in partnership with us to deliver on that goal over the next 3 years.

Enquiries:

Eckoh plc


Nik Philpot, Chief Executive Officer

Adam Moloney, Group Finance Director

Jim Hennigan, Executive Director

www.eckoh.com
Tel: 01442 458 300

Seymour Pierce Limited

Jonathan Wright
Tel: 020 7107 8000

Corfin Communications

Harry Chathli, Neil Thapar, Alexis Gore
Tel: 020 7977 0020

 

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 easier 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 ScottishPower.

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. More information can be found at www.eckoh.com.