METROPOLITAN EDISON COMPANY - Pennsylvania Public Utility ...

XI. CUSTOMER SERVICEBackground - The Stratified Management and Operations Audit of Metropolitan EdisonCompany (Met-Ed), Pennsylvania Electric Company (Penelec), and PennsylvaniaPower Company (Penn Power) (collectively referred to as the FirstEnergy PennsylvaniaCompanies or FE-PA Companies) conducted by the consulting firmBarrington-Wellesley Group, Inc. (BWG), released by the Pennsylvania Public UtilityCommission (PUC or Commission) on March 1, 2007 at D-05MGT002, D-05MGT003and D-05MGT004, contained ten recommendations in the Customer Service chapter.BWG rated this functional area as needing moderate improvement. In this chapter, fiveprior recommendations and prior situations are reviewed and five follow-up findings andfour recommendations are presented.Prior Recommendation – Improve customer call center performance in order toachieve the goal set in the Pennsylvania Reliability Settlement Agreement for the yearending December 31, 2005; i.e., answer 80% of customer calls within 30 seconds.Prior Situation – At its public meeting of November 4, 2004, at Docket NumberI-00040102, the Commission approved the Settlement Agreement in which the FE-PACompanies agreed to a set of commitments that were directed toward improving theservice reliability of the FE-PA Companies. The FE-PA Companies committed to takeappropriate steps to answer 80% of calls to its customer call center within 30 secondsfor the year ending December 31, 2005. The FE-PA Companies answered only 64% ofcustomer calls within 30 seconds during 2005. A higher than expected call volume,introduction of an upgrade to the voice response system and longer call durations inorder to accommodate a change in call handling procedures contributed to the FE-PACompanies failure to achieve the Settlement Agreement requirement.Follow-up Finding and Conclusion No. XI-1 – The FE-PA Companies’ percentageof calls answered within 30 seconds needs to be improved.FirstEnergy Corp. (FirstEnergy) uses three call centers to receive customer calls,one which is operated by FirstEnergy and two which are contract operations. TheReading, PA Contact Center operated by FirstEnergy handles customer service relatedcalls such as reporting an outage, a request to start or stop service, billing relatedinquiries, and other general questions related to electric service. The other call centers,one operated by Out-Sourcing, Inc. (OSI) and the other operated by National CollectionOffice (NCO) after its merger with OSI, handle the incoming credit related calls forFirstEnergy’s active Pennsylvania customers.A comparison of the percentage of calls answered within 30 seconds by theFE-PA Companies and a panel of other Pennsylvania electric distribution companies(EDCs) for the years 2005 through 2009 is summarized on Exhibit XI-1. As shown inExhibit XI-1, although the FE-PA Companies’ percentage of calls answered within 30seconds increased from 64% in 2005 to 80% in 2006, it subsequently declined to 78%in 2009. The percentage of calls answered within 30 seconds for the panel of other- 73 -