“The downtown office drive-through will remain open for more than likely up to six months,” Littleton said. “We’re working on an agreement with Athens Federal (Community) Bank in downtown Lenoir City that they’ll also be taking payments for us, so we’re not going to vacate downtown and leave our customers stranded in that area that like to do business from the downtown perspective.”
 

The bank partnership will go into effect in 30-45 days, Littleton said.
 

“We wanted to have somewhat of a presence downtown and be able to allow people to pay their bills, and we have people who do this already,” Eddie Simpson, LCUB vice chairman, said. “You can pay your bills at SunTrust (Bank), you can pay them at ... United Community (Bank).”
 

Residents can also pay bills at the new facility when customer service becomes operational Monday, Littleton said.
 

Littleton believes the new facility will greatly enhance the customer experience.
 

“The relationship they have with our call center is going to allow customers to be more informed about their services, how to adequately utilize their services and conserve their services,” he said. “We’ll have these meeting rooms that you see here to meet with customers on a one-on-one basis.
 

“Also, just the proximity of this building’s going to get us in many cases 15-20 minutes better response time to customers for outages and serve those needs,” he added. “... All the equipment and I guess the applications that we’ve been working on for so many years now, they’re now going to be utilized now in this building from our fiber that we’ve got deployed from this building, to the software that’s been installed in this building.”
 

The new center will allow LCUB representatives to see every circuit in real time through a large map placed on the control center wall. Littleton said the center can “drill down into the mapping” for outages.
 

“If we had an outage going on, it’ll tell us the pole number, the location,” Littleton said. “It’ll predict what’s happened, what device has been affected. So it pinpoints the issue immediately and our crew ... is going to have this same information in their vehicles.”
 

Relocating equipment since August has gone rather smoothly, but Littleton said the effort still had challenges.
 

“We’ve been planning 12 months for this move,” Littleton said. “It just didn’t happen in the last 60 days. So now we’ve executed our plan. Yeah, it’s been tough, but it’s gone flawlessly at this point.”
 

Construction on the $42 million facility has been underway for two years.
 

“I am elated actually with how the building has turned out,” Simpson said. “The technology and such is bringing us finally into the 21st century. It should have been done years ago, but we’ve saved money and put back money and paid everything off so when we started building that building we were totally debt-free, and that’s a fact. Our utilities were debt-free.”