Top Kentucky and Indiana officials took steps Thursday to improve customer service for RiverLink drivers, acknowledging struggles since a new operator took over the toll network last summer.
The Kentucky-Indiana Joint Board, the bistate government panel that oversees the project, voted at a meeting in Louisville to give $2.3 million to RiverLink provider Electronic Transaction Consultants to hire new workers and another $1 million to increase pay for local employees.
The move comes as call wait times and customer service requests have ballooned as Electronic Transaction Consultants works to handle a backlog of invoices that occurred as the states brought on the Texas-based company in September under a 10-year contract valued at nearly $80 million.
Before the change, there were an average of up to 2,000 phone calls to RiverLink representatives each day, or roughly 60,000 per month. In December, there were 82,000 calls, according to data presented to the board.
Clark Packer, the Indiana Department of Transportation’s deputy commissioner for operations, said the states are trying to make it easier for drivers who use the toll bridges.
Mindy Peterson, a RiverLink spokeswoman, said the average call wait time has been 30 minutes in recent weeks and was about 13 1/2 minutes on Wednesday. Under its contract, Electronic Transaction Consultants aims to answer 80% of calls in less than one minute.
The $2.3 million approved Wednesday will help Electronic Transaction Consultants subcontractor, Global Agility Solutions, hire an additional 50 workers to handle phone calls over the next nine months. Peterson said those representatives are expected to be in place by mid-February.
That would bring the total number of people in customer service positions to about 95.
The other $1 million would go towards raising pay for full-time workers at Electronic Transaction Consultant’s Louisville call center and walk-in payment centers in downtown Louisville and Jeffersonville, Indiana, and cover other overhead costs.
The pay increase amounts to $5 per hour, bringing the average to about $20 per hour.
Tolls have been in place since late 2016 on three bridges connecting Louisville and Clark County, Indiana: the Interstate 65 Lincoln and Kennedy crossings downtown, and the upriver Lewis and Clark Bridge.
Kentucky and Indiana leaders agreed on the fees as part of the financing plan for the $2.3 billion billion Ohio River Bridges Project, which included the new Lincoln and Lewis and Clark bridges and a rebuilt Spaghetti Junction interchange near downtown Louisville.
The toll network doesn’t have tollbooths, relying instead on pictures of license plates and scanned transponders to bill drivers.
The states hired Austrian-based Kapsch TrafficCom to collect tolls on the network they named RiverLink. Electronic Transaction Consultants was chosen in 2021 to replace Kapsch and began its work last September.
Source: WDRB
You must be logged in to post a comment.