Manager of Consumer Affairs
PUF: What do you do at the Commission?
Claudette Willingham: I'm the Manager of Consumer Affairs. We are the first contact for consumers. They call with questions and complaints. They also call to ask what we do, and what we regulate. Most of the calls we get are just simple questions.
We get just as many calls about what we don't regulate as what we do regulate. People call us about landlord/tenant issues. We are working on one of those right now. We are also called about city utilities and county utilities. It's amazing what we do.
We do a lot of Googling, so once we get calls about something that we don't regulate, we can pass on the information we find about who to contact back to the caller. My staff are information referral specialists, and I tell them referral is going to be what you do the most.
So, we refer callers to other agencies. In addition, I think it's been maybe fifteen years since we've done do-not-call lists, but we still get calls about that. We get calls about a little bit of everything.
PUF: Do you ever get any angry callers?
Claudette Willingham: Yes. We just got another one recently. We listen, because that's what we're here to do. I tell my staff all the time, don't take it personally. You just listen to it. You tell them what we can do.