It’s tough to please everyone … but you have to try January 12, 2012

Now that the BCS National Championship is in the books, the “powers that be” are gathering to discuss the future of the Bowl Championship Series. For years, advocates of the BCS have claimed the system puts the two best teams on the field against each other at the end of the year, while opponents argue the system is not fair for all teams in the NCAA.

Regardless of the decisions made over the next few months, when the new contract goes into place prior to the 2014 season one thing will be certain: there will be some people that are happy … and some that are not. The truth of the matter – in sports or in any other facet of life – is that you can’t please all the people all the time.

The key to customer satisfaction in any industry is pleasing as many people as possible. For utilities that means providing customers with what they desire most. According to a recent Chartwell consumer survey, the most important drivers of customer satisfaction are – not surprisingly – reliability and cost.

While no utility will ever perform without any service interruptions, customers care most that service is restored as quickly as possible and that they are kept informed. J.D. Power and Associates, which has measured customer satisfaction in the utility industry since 1999, reported in 2011 the top performing utilities provided more outage information points (2.5 per outage) than others (2.3 or fewer).

As for pricing, provided there are no alternatives, there is a pretty simple formula: the lower the cost, the happier a customer will be. J.D. Power’s numbers also show utilities ranking in the first and second quartile have significantly lower costs at 10.41 and 10.49 cents per kilowatt hour, respectively, compared with 12.17 for the third quartile and 13.39 for the fourth. However, all customer satisfaction levels cannot be simply tied to energy costs as there are a number of variables – some of which are out of a utility’s control – that affect pricing.

There’s no question, customer satisfaction took a major hit during the economic downturn from 2005 to 2008, but it appears customers are becoming happier with the state of utilities as more than half of the 1,509 consumers that participated in Chartwell’s survey expressed their level of overall satisfaction as “very” or “extremely” satisfied with their utility provider.

For more on customer satisfaction, download Chartwell’s newest Customer Care Service report, Customer Satisfaction 2012, which takes a deeper look into how utilities are measuring and improving satisfaction. Chartwell will continue – as it has over the years – to track customer satisfaction.