Every employee at Greenville Utilities is to be congratulated for providing excellent customer service! During a recent customer satisfaction survey, a vast majority of those called upon gave their experiences with GUC employees a high rating. 

As a community-owned utility, our driving force is a commitment to customer service. For this reason, we periodically go straight to the source and ask customers how we’re doing. During May, we contracted with Great Blue Research to conduct both a telephone and email customer satisfaction survey. This is the first time that email has been used to conduct the satisfaction survey with our customers.  

The objectives of the survey were to find out how customers feel about the following: 

• Overall Satisfaction of GUC 
• Interaction with Employees 
• Customer Service 
• Perception of Reliability 
• Service Value/Quality 
• Communications 

Customers were asked questions pertaining to these categories and were able to rate their answers on a five-point scale, with “five” being the most positive and “one” being the most negative. We had 627 customers complete the survey through email, and 100 customers gave their responses over the phone. 

How We Measure Up 
The survey results show that a majority of the customers surveyed gave high rankings in all of the categories. As in years past, questions related specifically to employees received the highest scores. We had 79% of our surveyed customers give GUC a four or five rating for customer service, while 82% gave the same rating for their interactions with employees, and 70% gave the same ranking for overall satisfaction with GUC.  

Reliability also continues to rank high with every service, coming in at an average of 92% of our customers giving a four or five rating for electric, gas, and water reliability.  

Even more remarkable is our Net Promoter Index (NPI) score, which reflects the likelihood of our customers recommending GUC to friends and family if they were given a choice in utility providers. The average industry NPI for gas and electric customers across the United States is 3.89, and GUC scored an impressive 26, which is six times better than the industry average! 

“We have consistently received high marks with past customer satisfaction surveys, and our employees are once again to be commended on our newest high scores,” said Scott Mullis, Director of Customer Relations. “Since we introduced email for the time as the main method for collecting opinions from our customers, these results will now serve as the new baseline for future surveys.”  

Something worth noting in this year’s survey is a growing customer interest in paying extra to reduce carbon emissions. Seventy five percent of customers said they were willing to pay extra to help GUC reduce carbon emissions. Nearly 45% were willing to pay up to $5 more, and 14% were willing to pay up to $10 more. 

Surveys don’t end with receiving the results. In addition to providing a tool for measuring customer satisfaction, this survey allows us to better plan for future improvements. It provides a wealth of information, and many of our customers even took the time to give us specific feedback on how to improve.  

“With the results and customer feedback from this survey, we can look forward to continued improvement with confidence,” said Scott.