Leading car hire providers, Enterprise, has confirmed that it will continue to work with speech recognition experts, Eckoh, in providing its customers with an easy to use store location service. Through its EckohLOCATE system customers phoning Enterprise to pinpoint the location of an outlet need only to say the name of the town they are interested in, after they are connected to Enterprise National Reservations, and EckohLOCATE will inform them of the Enterprise branches nearest to their location.

The speech recognition system also gives customers the option of finding out contact information, branch opening hours and the branch address. If a customer chooses, then the system is capable of patching their call through to a particular Enterprise outlet.

Eckoh’s chief executive officer, Nik Philpot, said that he was pleased the relationship between Enterprise and Eckho was still as strong as ever. He added that by providing the speech recognition service for simple information, such as outlet location, Enterprise customer service teams were free to concentrate on dealing with more complicated enquires.

The system cuts out the need for customer service representatives to constantly deal with handing out basic information which is requested by customers on a repetitive basis. Since launching its telephone reservations service to customers seven days a week, 24-hours a day, in October 2004, the service has dealt with over 1.5 million call minutes.

Enterprise Rent-A-Car’s IT director for Europe, Parthi Cumarasamy, said that it was always the firm’s intention to provide its customers with the highest possible level of service and, through Eckoh, Enterprise is delivering a fast, simple, efficient locator service.