Pepco Earns CS Week's Innovation in Customer Service Award

Pepco Holdings, Inc. (PHI), an energy holding company engaged in regulated utility operations and sale of competitive energy products and services to residential and commercial customers, has reportedly earned the 2009 Expanding Excellence "Innovation in Customer Service" Award, presented by CS Week and Electric Light & Power at the CS Week Annual Conference.


Pepco was awarded for its outstanding contribution and innovation in utility customer service for implementing the Mutual Assistance Routing System, or MARS (patent pending), provided by Twenty First Century Communications.

TFCC and Pepco collaborated with members of the Southeast Electric Exchange (SEE) to identify mutual assistance needs in utility customer service, and to craft a solution using TFCC's telecom platform and web-based software. MARS was designed in 2008 to address the utilities problem raised during and after a disaster and to respond to the influx of customer calls to report outages and get information.

MARS also helps in re-routing the calls from people in storm-stricken areas to customer service representatives at other utilities. According to TFCC, MARS makes it possible to outsource calls to actual utility Customer Service Representatives with industry knowledge and experience. It is the next evolution of TFCC’s industry-standard High Volume Call Answering (HVCA), which is widely used by utilities in outage situations.

TFCC developed the first automated high volume call handling system to allow organizations to answer and place thousands of calls in just minutes. TFCC handles outage calls for 80 of the largest U.S. utilities and serves hundreds of organizations nationwide with mass public alert and emergency notification services.

The MARS program is receiving nationwide attention and was also nominated for the S.E.E. Industry Excellence Award earlier this year. What’s more it was featured in the Wall Street Journal on May 11th in the story Utilities Unite to Upgrade Response During Storms.