Water quality and customer satisfaction go hand-in-hand

Last month, J.D. Power released the results of its annual survey of residential water customers across the U.S. to understand their level of satisfaction with their local water utility. The results suggest that customers experience more water quality issues than indicated in Consumer Confidence Reports.

“Thirty percent of customers told us they had some problem with water quality,” Andrew Heath, senior director of J.D. Power’s Utility Practice, told me in a recent interview. “You and I could go and look at the Consumer Confidence Reports, we could look at [EPA’s] Safe Drinking Water Information System — we won’t find that level of violations.”

Heath was quick to note that the problems that customers are typically referring to are not health-related but rather taste, odor, color, or even low pressure. The question, he said, is not whether the water is safe but whether it’s good. “We find that thirty percent of customers tell J.D. Power that, in their mind, the water they get from their local utility is not good,” he said.

The survey found quite a wide variation in customers’ perceptions of “water quality,” but one thing was clear: water quality has a huge impact on how happy water customers are. “It’s one of the biggest drivers of satisfaction that we test,” Heath noted. “And we find that water quality — the product coming from the faucet — is a big driver of overall satisfaction.”

Having happy customers isn’t just a feel-good goal; it can be key to getting support for critical water infrastructure projects. “Without that, it’s hard to get either the regulatory (for private water utilities) or public approval to go ahead and make those investments,” he said. He described it as a cycle — a virtuous one for utilities with good water quality and a vicious one for those without.

On a positive note, Heath said there was general improvement across most of the topics surveyed: billing and payment, price, communications, conservation. “The one area that did not improve, unfortunately, was customer service,” he said. In the survey, J.D. Power narrowly defined that as the interaction a customer has with the utility on the phone or through the website.

The decline here is probably not an indication of a lower level of service, Heath explained. “It’s far more likely a consequence of higher expectations of customers.” Because of their experiences with other retailers and service industries, customers are becoming accustomed to faster and easier resolution of their issues. This rise in customer expectations applies to all industries, he noted. “Water utilities need to understand that,” he added, and recommended that water utilities think about “how they also can improve the services customers receive when they make contact.”

In terms of making improvements, one thing water utilities may want think about is being proactive about customer outreach, Heath suggested. For example, if the water utility can detect a leak before a customer notices, “[contacting] the customer, letting them know there might be a problem is definitely one area where there’s potential room to improve.” But, he noted, even simple things like letting a customer know a bill is ready or that payment has been received will go a long way toward building a positive relationship with customers.