WTU will close its  office this month

By Roger Estlack, Clarendon Enterprise

American Electric Power (AEP)-West Texas Utilities (WTU) Clarendon office will remain open for customers to make bill payments until July 31, 2000.  After this date the front office will be closed for all customer transactions.

“We announced in February that the office would remain open until September 30, 2000; however, personnel changes have made it necessary for us to discontinue taking ‘walk-in’ payments sooner than we had originally planned,” said Jeff Thigpen, AEP-WTU area business manager.

All local phone calls to the Clarendon office will be forwarded to the Customer Service Center in Corpus Christi, which is available to accept calls 24 hours a day, seven days a week.  Representatives at the Customer Service Center provide prompt attention to requests for service connection or disconnection, account information, outage reports, or to answer other questions that customers may have.  For customer service, the toll-free number to call is 888-216-3523.

Customers currently have a number of convenient bill payment options available.  These include by mail, by automatic bank draft through the DirectAdvantage Plan, Internet electronic bill payment through www.transpoint.com, and credit or ATM card payment via the telephone for the ChoicePay Plan.

The Clarendon office will continue to be used as a base of operations for service technician employees, Mike Proffitt and Leon Ward, who work in the energy delivery area of the business.

“While we’re making changes in the way we conduct business, our commitment to provide superior customer service and reliability hasn’t changed,” Thigpen said.