TFCC Answers During Hurricane Ike

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
September 22, 2008

TFCC Answers the Call during Hurricane Ike and its Aftermath

Columbus, Ohio:  As Hurricane Ike ripped a swath across the United States, Columbus-based Twenty First Century Communications (TFCC) worked around the clock to support numerous utilities and public safety agencies downed by high winds.

The storm caused devastation and loss of power from the Texas Gulf Coast to the state of New York. In Ohio alone, millions of people were in outage, some for up to eight days.

From Sunday, September 14th through Friday, September 19th, Twenty First Century answered more than 3,000,000 phone calls from utility customers reporting outages, through its High Volume Call Answering (HVCA) system.

HVCA routes calls away from the utility across TFCC’s massive interactive voice response platform. It collects information from callers and feeds it into utilities’ outage management, customer information and workforce management systems, enabling them to assess the outage footprint and efficiently address restoration.

TFCC established a new record number of calls handled on a single day. On Sunday, September 14th TFCC moved over 1.2 million calls across its network. In addition to outage reporting, this also included a Texas university’s class cancellation announcements and campus evacuations, notice of open storm shelters in Chicago, and storm notice calls in New York.