Connecticut Light & Power Co. improved its rating on business-customer satisfaction, but continues to lag behind most electric utilities in the East and nationally, according to J.D. Power & Associates.
CL&P is owned by Hartford-based Northeast Utilities, and is the primary provider of electricity in Fairfield County. It marked CL&P”™s first such rating since Jeff Butler was hired last June as president of CL&P, replacing Raymond Necci who retired.
Of 13 large utilities in the East, CL&P ranked ninth for satisfaction among business customers, slightly behind New York City-based Con Edison and just ahead of National Grid, which has its U.S. headquarters in Westborough, Mass. New Haven-based United Illuminating Co., which provides power in the Bridgeport area, was not included in the survey.
Allentown, Pa.-based PPL Electric Utilities was deemed the top utility in the East for large utilities, with Pittsburgh-based Duquesne Light getting top marks for mid-sized utilities.
Overall, Westlake Village, Calif.-based J.D. Power indicated customers nationally were more satisfied with their utilities in 2009 than the year before, due to improvements in power reliability and corporate citizenship.
In interviews with some 16,000 businesses nationally, J.D. Power also queried them on utility billing systems, prices, communication and customer service.
“Electric utilities are doing a particularly good job of raising awareness of their new conservation and efficiency programs, which resonates with cost-conscious business customers,” said Alan Destribats, vice president of the energy utility practice at J.D. Power.
The study also found that utilities may be able to mitigate low satisfaction levels due to outages by providing comprehensive information when they occur. Among business customers who called their utility to report an outage, those who received four or more pieces of outage information were nearly as satisfied overall as those who never experienced an outage.
“By proactively communicating about corporate citizenship initiatives and power-outage information, electric utilities are providing additional value to their business customers, to which those customers are responding positively,” Destribats said. “As utility website usage continues to grow among business customers, websites will become an increasingly important tool in these communication efforts.”
