What happens when state employees decide for customers

What happens when state employees decide for customers?

Are customers, utilities and regulators reading off the same page when it comes to the quality of customer service?
     Navigant Consulting, in a study for the Center for the Advancement of Energy Markets (CAEM), found a "troubling gap" between regulators from utilities and their customers on what constitutes good service, said Peter Shaw, a Navigant director.
     Regulators concentrate on measurable improvements -- such as shortening the time customers spend on hold -- while customers are more concerned about who they talk to and the response they get when their calls are picked up, Shaw explained.
     Penalizing utilities "for occasional non-compliance with answer call-time targets tends to send a message that utilities should focus on meeting speed targets over high-quality interactions," Shaw added.
     Service quality is up, utilities told Navigant, pointing to expanded service options, new self-service features and customer satisfaction research.
     Yet regulators see quality declining and blame utility cost cutting as the culprit, Navigant found.
     Those self-service applications seem to regulators as compromising customer service.
     Utilities find regulators don't take into consideration their costs of meeting new quality standards and think inflexible measures "ignore the dynamic nature of utility customer demands," Navigant learned.
     Customer service quality (CSQ) measures fall into four categories -- call center, billing, meter reading and voice of the customer -- but commissioners don't always agree how they should be measured, Navigant found.
     Commissions may apply standards statewide or to individual utilities and nationwide standards fail to appreciate regional variations, differences in customer and regulator expectations, cost alignment and flexibility, Navigant concluded.
     Efforts to standardize nationwide -- such as NARUC's effort to create a Call Center Answer Time Model Rule -- are problematic for the same reasons.
     BOTTOMLINE: When markets are open and power marketers are regulated by the discipline of the marketplace the public will be free to walk away from poor service and customers won't need third-party regulators to determine for them how suppliers should behave. Meanwhile we're stuck with this. (Story originally published in Restructuring Today 1/13/04)