ACS gets another 10 to 13 years on $500m+ customer service contract for E-ZPass

ACS, the Dallas TX based computer services conglomerate says it has been awarded a 10 to 13 year renewal of its contract at the E-ZPass New York Customer Service Center. The contract described as worth "more than $500m" was put up for rebid last year but potential competitors said the incumbent was in an overwhelmingly strong position to win.

The contract is for ten years with a three year extension.

Michael Huerta, ACS managing director for transport is quoted: "ACS appreciates our valued agency clients for once again selecting us through the competitive bid process. We look forward to many more years of serving the people of New York with E-ZPass."

The New York Customer Service Center serves E-Zpass customers of MTA Bridges and Tunnels, the New York State Thruway Authority (NYSTA) and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. NYSTA in its turn looks after electronic tolling at the New York State Bridge Authority, so all four major toll agencies operating in New York state are serviced through the ACS operated network.

The main center housed in an old multistory warehouse building on the waterfront of Staten Island with splendid views of New York harbor and the Verrazano Narrows bridge services some 3.2m toll accounts, processes 450m toll transactions a year (1.23m/day), handles some 5m customer telephone calls, dispatches daily new Mark IV transponders by US mail, maintains the business websites for E-ZPass New York and processes some millions of toll violations, doing image review and penalty notices. It also operates eight walk-in service centers that service 840k walk-ins/yr and a secondary telephone call center in Spring Valley NY.

The original customer service contract was won by Lockheed Martin IMS (LMIMS) division with the New York State Thruway in 1993, with MTAB&T joining in 1995 and PANYNJ in 1997. MTAB&T were so unhappy with the early service they were close to declaring the company to be in contract default in the early days of E-ZPass in 1995 and 1996.

LMIMS produced a system that repeatedly crashed in the critical first several weeks of MTAB&T's E-ZPass leaving hundreds of operators with no way of handling huge volumes of calls. They ordered insufficient telecom links leading to long wait times and large volumes of dropped calls by angry customers for many months until extra telecom capacity was obtained. Software code had to be extensively rewritten.

It took them a year or more but they eventually had a system working smoothly.

ACS acquired the business when they bought LMIMS from Lockheed in 2001. ACS now claim they are achieving high standards of customer service. They cite assessments by a Purdue University "Center for Customer-Driven Quality" that claims to rate customer service.

Other ACS centers

ACS are by far the largest customer service contractors for American electronic tolling. As well as the New York center they operate the second largest center that looks after the New Jersey Turnpike and Graden State Parkway in Secaucus NJ, a center in Rockville Maryland that handles multiple agencies and one in northern California that deals with tolling at the Bay Area Toll Authority's seven bridges and the Golden Gate Bridge.

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