With customer satisfaction down overall across the industry due to higher energy bills, Piedmont Natural Gas has been largely focused on increasing satisfaction by transforming the service-order experience. Its efforts have paid off.
Piedmont topped the list of Easiest Utilities to Do Business With in the Cogent Syndicated 2023 Utility Trusted Brand and Customer Engagement: Residential study, with TECO Peoples Gas and Chattanooga Gas Company tied for second.
Overall, the Customer Effort Score—a composite based on customer ratings across 23 attributes—declined to the lowest level ever recorded by the study. Yet amid this decline, the 46 utilities recognized as the Easiest to Do Business With demonstrated a three-point increase in their Customer Effort Score.
For Piedmont, this increase came after analyzing internal data and identifying focus areas and actions to improve the customer experience. In 2021, it learned that its customers wanted a more modern service experience, enabled by selfservice options and customized notifications to keep them informed throughout their service-order process.
“The service-order process is a large driver of our customer satisfaction, as our Customer Field Operations technicians visit approximately 400,000 customers a year to start, stop or transfer service; inspect and service natural gas appliances; and perform maintenance activities,” Sasha Weintraub, senior vice president and president of Piedmont Natural Gas, told American Gas. “Based on customer feedback, we transformed the service-order experience by identifying a series of improvements.”
Improvements made by Piedmont include:
Adequate staffing was also identified as a critical component of the customer experience. “Our staffing model is developed to answer 80% of our customer calls in 20 seconds or less,” Weintraub said.
For more information, visit Escalent, the data analytics and advisory firm that produced the study.