EdC Unveils New Customer Center for Help at All Hours

A 24-hour emergency phone line with quick response units, better customer service for voicing complaints and paying bills, and new electricity service in­stalled three times faster were am­ong the features Electricite du Cambodge announced at the opening of it first customer-service center on Wednesday.

The center, located at 210 Mao Tse-tung Blvd, is part of EdC’s restructuring of its Phnom Penh operations. The city is being di­vided in two sections, each with a customer service office.

People in the core of the city—bordered by Sihanouk and Mao Tse-tung boulevards on the north and south and Street 70 and the Tonle Sap river on the east and west—will be served by the current EdC office at Wat Phnom where a customer-service office is to open in Feb­ruary 2002. The other customers will be handled at the new office on Mao Tse-tung Boulevard (tel: 023-215-629).

Each office will have about 140 employees who will process all customer needs—from installation requests and payments, to emergency response by units equipped with mini-vans and motorcycles. The offices will be open from 7:30 am to 4:30 pm, though emergency service will be available 24 hours.

People also will be able to call to check on their bills during of­fice hours. The waiting period for new service should go down from 45 to 15 days, said Men Sarun, executive commercial director for EdC.

The project is being funded through a $3.5 million grant from the French development agency. El­ec­tricite de France, which has been providing technical assistance to EdC since the early 1990s, is helping with the project.

Restructuring operations into two full-service offices became necessary due to EdC’s increasing number of customers, said Pat­rick Le Penven, the EdF project manager in Cambodia. EdC has gone from 38,000 customers in 1998 to 110,000 today, he said.

EdC has been able to repair old installations and bring the service into new areas with the support of the Asian Development Bank and the Japan International Coop­eration Agency, Men Sarun said.

EdC now operates in five pro­vinces. A detailed study to bring the service to rural areas in eight ad­ditional provinces should start shortly, Le Penven said.