LOS ANGELES (February 19, 2021) – Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP), the nation’s largest municipal utility, was recognized as a 2020 Business Customer Champion by a national survey conducted by Escalent, a leading customer satisfaction and analytics firm. The survey identified 23 utilities in the United States with the highest Engaged Customer Relationship (ECR) scores. The ranking is based on a national survey of commercial customers published in a 2020 Cogent Syndicated Utility Trusted Brand & Customer Engagement™: Business study.
“We are honored to have been recognized as a Business Customer Champion for the 4th time, especially during a time when our customers need us most,” said Martin L. Adams, LADWP General Manager and Chief Engineer. “We believe this is a direct result of a committed team of professionals providing consistent, reliable, customer service to businesses across the City of Los Angeles.”
Escalent surveyed 14,980 business electric, natural gas and combination utility customers from the 77 largest U.S. utility companies for its ECR index. To be recognized as a Business Customer Champion, utilities score in the industry top decile; have the top score in the region; or are within 20 points of the top regional score and above the industry range.
LADWP continues to receive high scores in many categories, including safety and reliability, customer and field service, billing and payment, and communications effectiveness, which all contributed to receiving this recognition.
Recognizing the unique challenges that our business customers faced during the pandemic, the Department placed a strong focus on its customers’ online experience by continuously updating and sharing pertinent information about their water and power service, payment assistance programs, and other COVID-19 related resources through social media channels, its corporate website at www.ladwp.com/COVID19Response, its newsroom at www.ladwpnews.com as well as through its commercial account liaisons.
Understanding that some business needs to be handled in-person for commercial customers, the Department also offered in-person, socially distanced appointments to help guide customers during this time of need. Many popular workshops were also transitioned to virtual platforms to maintain support and continuity.
Customer service also made improvements during the pandemic to better serve the residential customer, by offering convenient online features, such as reporting outages online and enabling customers to apply for certain rebate programs online without needing to download, mail or fax paper documents. Also, the text and email outage notification system has seen a 70% increase in subscriptions over the last year.
For the 2019-2020 Fiscal Year, the Customer Service Division answered over 1.7 million calls and responded to over 33,000 customer emails.
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