Electric Utility Business Customer Satisfaction Rising
In what amounts to a pleasant surprise, a recent survey indicates that electric utility business customer satisfaction has risen significantly year-over-year. This is surprising to me because I assumed customer satisfaction at all levels would be lower due to recent high profile power outages, increased climate change and cyber risks, and the introduction of planned outages in California. Let’s take a closer look into the survey results.
Detailing the Improvement in Utility Business Customer Satisfaction
The results from J.D. Power’s 2019 Electric Utility Business Customer Satisfaction Study were released in November 2019. Over 21,000 business customers were interviewed for the survey, which has been conducted for 21 years and targets 87 electric utilities that serve at least 40,000 business customers. It measures satisfaction in the context of power quality, reliability, corporate citizenship, price, billing, communications, and customer service.
This year’s survey revealed that overall satisfaction amongst business customers has risen from 76.1% last year to 77.9% this year. The survey indicates that the increase is mainly due to utility efforts to improve proactive customer communications, enhance visibility of infrastructure improvements, enhance online account functionality, and adopt technology that is better able to predict outage durations and push out customized emergency alerts.
As you might imagine, results were geographically influenced. For example, survey respondents on the west coast scored lower, in part because wildfire-weary California respondents are not confident that infrastructure maintenance is as good as it can be. Results were also somewhat dependent on the level of engagement between the customer and the utility – for example, customers that regularly engage with the utility’s website, and sign up for mobile alerts, tend to be more satisfied.
Overall, I think this is fantastic news, because let’s face it – our industry can use as much positive PR as possible! The top-2 lessons from the survey, no matter if we’re talking utility business customer satisfaction or residential customer satisfaction, is that it helps to over-communicate and that improving technology, especially websites and alert functionality, can go a long way toward winning customers over.
