Eckoh, a developer of speech recognition solutions for customer contact centers, has secured a new three-year contract with Whitbread, a U.K. hotelier, to provide a speech-enabled reservations and cancellations service to Whitbread's hotel brand, Premier Inn.
The service, which is compliant with the Payment Card Industry's Data Security Standards, is due to be deployed in March. It will provide Premier Inn customers with the ability to book and cancel rooms at any Premier Inn hotel throughout the United Kingdom..
"We chose Eckoh because they proved to us that they could provide us with the highest level of PCI DSS-compliant infrastructure and the ability to scale up, both of which are crucial to our growth plans and commitment to delivering outstanding customer service," said Kenny King, head of procurement for information systems at Whitbread, the UK's largest hotel and restaurant company. Premier Inn is the UK's largest and fastest-growing hotel brand, with 578 hotels and more than 40,000 rooms across the UK and Ireland. It is expected to add a further 1,905 rooms over the next six months, with the focus on increasing market share and continuing to meet the needs of its customers.
Eckoh processes more than £200 million in payments annually. The company's VoiceXML platform provides the capability and scalability to meet Premier Inn's future growth requirements.
Nik Philpot, CEO of Eckoh, commented: "We are delighted to have been chosen by Whitbread to host Premier Inn's new booking service in our PCI-compliant environment, which will ensure that their customers' cardholder data will be managed securely and they will receive the best possible customer service. This is the second significant contract win for our newly accredited service and, as such, is an affirmation of our strategy to invest in achieving the highest level of compliance. The Eckoh platform will provide Whitbread with the scalability to deliver on their growth strategy and, combined with our PCI compliant infrastructure, will ensure their customers' cardholder data is properly protected at all times."
Eckoh
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
Singer Capital Markets
Shaun Dobson Tel: 020 3205 7500
About Eckoh plc
Eckoh is the UK's leading developer of speech recognition for customer contact centres. 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 Whitbread
Whitbread is the UK's largest hotel and restaurant company operating businesses in the budget hotels and restaurant sectors. Its brands include Premier Inn, Beefeater, Table Table, Brewers Fayre, Taybarns and Costa Coffee. Whitbread employs more than 34,000 people and serves 9 million customers every month in its 2,000 outlets across the UK. Whitbread PLC is a FTSE 100 company, listed on the London Stock Exchange. It is also a member of the FTSE4Good Index. For more information, visit: www.whitbread.co.uk
About Premier Inn
Premier Inn is the U.K.'s largest and fastest-growing hotel brand with 578 budget hotels and more than 40,000 rooms across the U.K. and Ireland. In 2008 Premier Inn launched in Dubai and will be opening in India later this year. For more information, visit: www.premierinn.com.