Mutual Assistance Routing System (MARS)

Mutual Assistance Routing System provides mutual assistance for call centers.

Mutual assistance is a cornerstone of the utility industry. But until now, it has been limited to line crews, equipment and other resources dedicated to power restoration . TFCC’s Mutual Assistance Routing System (MARS) makes it possible for utilities to help each other with the customer service aspects of outage management. Read the whole story.

It is the next evolution of TFCC’s industry-standard High Volume Call Answering (HVCA), widely used by utilities to handle overflow calls with automation. With MARS, utilities can route overflow outage calls to other utilities’ call centers, to be answered by actual utility Customer Service Representatives with industry knowledge and experience. “MARS is the next generation of mutual assistance,” said Barb Powers, Tampa Electric’s Director of Customer Services.

Click to read the case study, Virtual Mutual Assistance – a Value Proposition for Customer Care.

When needed, “requesting utilities” call upon “responding utilities” to answer a designated number of calls. Responding utilities indicate the number of agents they can allocate and which phone numbers will receive calls. Agents log into a web interface and talk directly with the requesting utility’s customers, not only collecting outage information, but also providing restoration times. MARS automatically generates outage tickets, which are sent to the requesting utility’s outage management system – just like HVCA.

With MARS, utilities can maintain superior customer service, even in major events that impact their call centers.

MARS Benefits are Hailed Far and Wide:

• MARS is featured in the Wall Street Journal article, “Utilities Unite to Upgrade Response During Storms.”
• EnergyBiz Magazine ran the story, “MARS on Earth to Benefit Utilities and Their Customers in Times of Crisis” (PDF)
• Hear from a MARS client:  Al Osterling, General Supervisor – Project Development for Pepco, speaks about MARS (video) at the recent CS Week conference
• Bently Collier, TFCC’s Vice President of Sales and Marketing, described the benefits of MARS (video) at the 2009 DistribuTech Conference.

Next generation technology, designed by utilities for utilities

Patent Pending – 2008