Kentucky and Indiana approve $3.3 million to address RiverLink customer service woes

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) -- 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 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 ETC 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 and given to a reporter.

"We recognize the urgency to provide some immediate assistance for our customers," Amanda Spencer, assistant Kentucky state highway engineer, told the joint 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.

"I appreciate the fact that we are targeting the customer service element to this business," he said. "Obviously, we've seen some wait times and so forth kind of fluctuate as we work through the transition."

Packer said it's his understanding that some of those wait times have "been coming down" in recent weeks.

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, ETC aims to answer 80% of calls in less than one minute.

The Kentucky Transportation Cabinet, which has one of four seats on the joint board, has not yet provided documents WDRB News sought in a December 22 public records request asking for ETC's monthly operational reports and other records that would shed light on the company's performance.

A KYTC attorney said in an email last Saturday that the cabinet hopes to have its "review and approval" done by the end of this week.

State law requires records to be provided in five business days or give a precise date when the documents will be ready. KYTC has not done that.

The $2.3 million approved Wednesday will help ETC 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, she said.

The other $1 million would go towards raising pay for full-time workers at ETC'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.

"We are in a very competitive environment and wages have increased a lot," Peterson said. "We've seen record inflation. Businesses are reacting to that. We want to react to that. We want to build a team that's going to be around, that's going to have continuity."

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. ETC was chosen in 2021 to replace Kapsch and began its work last September.

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