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.