How to Fix Water Infrastructure without Upsetting Customers
Water utilities are faced with the massive challenge of how to fix water infrastructure without totally alienating their customers. Considering that the EPA projects that nearly half a trillion dollars will be needed to fix water infrastructure over the next 2 decades, this is a challenge that is clearly easier said than done!
The Challenge of How to Fix Water Infrastructure
Challenge #1 is the money. Half a trillion dollars? Yeah, that’s not exactly pocket money, but somebody has to pay for it. All too often, that “somebody” is the rate payers, and no one wants their prices increased. Making things worse is that a rate case that people disagree with will typically end up on the media battleground, adding fuel to the proverbial fire.
Challenge #2 is the disruption to local residents. Water infrastructure problems involve digging up roads and could last for months, presenting local residents with a huge set of inconveniences.
Despite these challenges, largescale projects to fix water infrastructure can actually present utilities with a unique opportunity to counter these types of negative reactions. According to the results of JD Power’s recent Water Utility Residential Customer Satisfaction Study, this customer angst can be neutralized if people are educated on why it’s so important to repair aging water infrastructure. In other words, expectation management is critical.
This means that proactive customer communication around how these initiatives will improve water safety, reliability and quality can make or break customer perception. But here again, ensuring that residents actually receive the message can be a challenge, as the JD Power survey reveals that roughly 3 out of 4 people have no recollection of receiving a proactive communication from their water utility, a trend that has gotten steadily worse over the past 4 years.
Therefore, it’s not enough to send a communication, effort must be taken to ensure that the message is actually received. The good news is that the survey indicates that recall is substantially higher when 4 or more communications are received. So, it’s important to hit ‘em early and often.
In the final analysis, there is little doubt that efforts to fix water infrastructure are necessary to ensure reliable supply and minimal service outages going forward. But these efforts must be accompanied by proactive, multi-channel, high frequency customer communications to outline the benefits and manage expectations. Without customer buy-in, any efforts to repair infrastructure are going to be unnecessarily difficult.
