Eckoh, a developer of speech recognition solutions for customer contact centers, has been awarded a three-year contract with RCI Financial Services, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Renault S.A., for the provision of a payment solution using speech recognition technology. This follows Eckoh's accreditation of full compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard ("PCI DSS"), announced on 18 October 2010, and is the company's first contract win for the certified service.

Eckoh's real-time PCI compliant payment solution, EckohPAY, is due to be deployed by the end of the year for Renault and Nissan customers. The service will also use the company's EckohID product to securely authenticate the caller through a number of unique identifiers. The caller will then be able to make a real-time secure card payment or obtain a settlement figure. Payment and settlement figure requests can also be sent direct to the caller's mobile phone.

This contract reflects the importance of ensuring cardholder data is handled securely while still maintaining the highest level of customer service. Eckoh's solution provides a payment service that is secure, compliant and available 24x7, and also maximizes the efficiency of RCI's contact center agents by allowing them to focus on more complex customer queries.

Alan Heaffey, director of operations at RCI, comments: "It was critical for RCI to work with a payment supplier who could demonstrate full PCI DSS compliance. Eckoh not only provides this but they have the infrastructure required to serve our customers securely, quickly and efficiently. They have shown themselves to be highly responsive to our business needs and have given us the confidence that our customers' future demands will be well catered for."

Nik Philpot, CEO of Eckoh, says: "This contract win, which is a direct result of our recent PCI DSS accreditation, validates the efforts we have invested in this compliance process. It is a great achievement to be providing a service for Renault-Nissan, the fourth largest global automaker, and we look forward to a long relationship with RCI. Our EckohPAY product gives clients complete peace of mind that their customers' payments are being handled in a PCI compliant manner and at a cost that delivers a very fast return on investment. As a result, we expect demand for our payment solutions to continue to grow significantly in the coming months."

Enquiries

Nik Philpot, CEO 

Adam Moloney, Group Finance Director

www.eckoh.com                                                                                 

Tel: 01442 458 300

Corfin Public Relations          

Harry Chathli, Claire Norbury                                                           

Tel: 020 7596 2860

 Seymour Pierce

Jonathan Wright, Jeremy Porter (Nominated Adviser)                

Tel: 020 7107 8000

Jacqui Briscoe (Corporate Broking)

About Eckoh

Eckoh  is the UK's leading developer of speech recognition for customer contact centers. Eckoh's 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, whilst freeing up agents to deal with more complex enquiries. Eckoh is the largest developer of such hosted services in the UK.

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.com

About RCI Financial Services

Renault Finance and Renault Business Finance are trading names of RCI Financial Services Limited, a wholly owned subsidiary of Renault S.A.

RCI Financial Services Ltd finances 1 car every 8 minutes and prides itself in offering the top quality services that its customers have come to expect from a specialist motor company.

RCI Financial Services provides finance solutions to Renault and Nissan customers of new and used cars and light commercial vehicles. The company also acts as an insurance intermediary for payment protection and GAP products. In addition, RCI Financial Services provides funding to the Renault and Nissan dealer networks.

For more information, visit: www.renault.co.uk