Benchmarking Water Utility Customer Relations Best Practices

Customer satisfaction is important to water utilities to minimize customer complaints, maintain goodwill towards the utility, and increase public support for utility improvement initiatives. To date, there has been little guidance for water utilities regarding best practices in customer relations or associated metrics. This project sought to: identify customer relations best practices from other relevant organizations, identify metrics for both internal performance tracking and external comparison, and develop tools that will enable water utilities to improve customer relations, with the ultimate goal of improving customer satisfaction and utility efficiency. This project focused on call centers, meter reading, billing, payment processing, credit and collections, and customer-related field and meter services. The project also documented best practices and associated metrics from both within and outside the water industry. The main potential impact of the project is in the comprehensive web-based toolkit that was developed.