IF you are at home and the lights go out, the first thing you should grab is your phone.

The Trinidad and Tobago Electricity Commission (T&TEC) officially launched its new call centre, 800-TTEC, at the ballroom of the Hilton Trinidad and Conference Centre yesterday.

This new call centre is aimed at eliminating all the anxiety customers may experience as a result of an interruption in their electricity service, Public Utilities Minister Mustapha Abdul-Hamid said as he delivered the feature address yesterday.

And it will take you ’well under 90 seconds’ to get a response to your query, Abdul-Hamid assured.

This call centre will be jointly-operated by both T&TEC and Direc One.

And this more efficient record of trouble calls will also give T&TEC a better statistical analysis of all problems affecting the commission, its chairman Clement Imbert said yesterday.

T&TEC assistant general manager, administration, Glenford Cyrille, guaranteed the company’s over 405,000 customers that they would reach operators within an acceptable time frame when calls are made to the centre.

Cyrille said the centre, which was part of the company’s strategic plan for the next five years, was launched at the perfect time as the rainy season was the period of time that T&TEC experienced the most weather related outages.

The call centre will be operational 24 hours a day, seven days a week, Cyrille said.