Eckoh, a provider of customer service solutions using speech recognition, has been appointed by NIE Energy to develop a smartphone application. The smartphone application will enable customers to purchase electricity via their smartphones 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Through the EckohPAY product, which processes PCI DSS-compliant card payments, NIE Energy's customers can already purchase electricity using the phone and Web, and by the end of June via a smartphone application.
NIE Energy is the biggest electricity retailer in Northern Ireland, supplying more than 760,000 customers. Eckoh has been working with NIE Energy since 2005, initially delivering a telephone based solution using speech recognition. In 2007 this service was extended to include a Web-based solution, and the service has now been further extended to include the provision of smartphone-based solutions.
Research commissioned by NIE Energy showed 99 percent of its respondents were interested in making payments using a smartphone application. Eckoh's smartphone application will identify customers through a unique meter ID detailed on a top-up card. The payment card authorization and settlement will be handled in real-time and the customer will be issued a code to activate the purchased electricity. The customer will have the option to create a quick pay account, which will store their details securely, making future top-ups even faster.
"We have been working with Eckoh to develop a multichannel payment model for our customers, which includes a telephone, Web, and soon a smartphone payment service," said Ralph Graham of NIE Energy. "From the end of June, this smartphone application will enable us to offer our customers yet another way to purchase discounted electricity for their pay as you go Keypad and is designed to make the process even easier for our customers. We look forward to completing this smartphone application with Eckoh over the coming weeks and to it providing our customers with the highest standards of customer service."
"We are delighted to announce the development of this smartphone application, which complements our existing phone and Web solutions for NIE Energy, and this agreement is evidence of our multichannel capabilities," said Nik Philpot, CEO of of Eckoh. "Our ability to deliver solutions across multiple channels enables organizations to reduce the number of suppliers that they work with and deliver a more comprehensive and convenient customer experience. We believe this broadening of our proposition will be welcomed by our clients, and we expect to see revenue increasing from these complementary sales."
About Eckoh
Eckoh is the U.K.'s leading developer of speech recognition for customer contact centers. Eckoh also provides complementary Web, mobile, and smartphone applications to its portfolio of blue chip clients. Its sophisticated technology enables routine enquiries, transactions, or payments to be processed without the need for the consumer to actually talk to an agent. This significantly reduces its clients' operational costs, while freeing up agents to deal with more complex enquiries. Eckoh is the largest developer of such hosted services in the U.K. Eckoh's secure and resilient infrastructure has the scalability to handle more than 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.co
About NIE Energy Limited
NIE Energy, part of the Viridian Group, is the biggest electricity retailer in Northern Ireland, supplying more than 700,000 homes and more than 40,000 farms and businesses. For more information visit: www.nieenergy.co.uk