JACKSON, Miss. (WJTV) – Mississippi’s Public Service Commission (PSC) voted on Tuesday to consider bringing call centers for all public utility companies back to the state.

This action comes after a review of Entergy Mississippi’s response times to outages following severe storms in June 2023. Customers complained of long wait times for restoration estimates and poor customer service from Entergy’s help lines.

Central District Public Service Commissioner Brent Bailey said by getting more call centers in-state, customers could be better served.

“We’ve seen that the loss of in-state college centers for investor owned utilities has caused frustration among customers. We initially focused on Entergy because of the ramifications of results of our gene type brainstorms with the direction of our colleagues. We’re going to expand that out to consider all investor owned utilities in the state of Mississippi that do not currently have in-state customer service call centers. We think customer satisfaction be greatly improved by bringing these call centers back to the state of Mississippi,” said Bailey.

There will be a community forum event in Jackson on Tuesday, October 3 at the Mississippi e-Center at Jackson State University starting at 6:00 p.m.

Entergy Mississippi released a statement saying, “Entergy currently has 60 Mississippi-based contracted agents working in-state. We are also planning for new agents to be on-site at our contact center located in Jackson by November. In time, we estimate that the Jackson contact center will grow to approximately 140 agents working both on-site and at home. These plans are part of the company’s strategy to support customers across our four-state service area.”