CVPS met all service quality standards for 2007
RUTLAND, Vt. - Central Vermont Public Service met all of its service quality standards for 2007, the third straight year the company achieved that goal.
"Despite enormous challenges thrown at us by a series of big storms, our employees performed extremely well," President Bob Young said. "Their hard work continues to improve our overall service quality and customer satisfaction, which is reflected by J.D. Powers most recent national survey. It ranked CVPS first among similarly sized utilities in the East for power quality and reliability, company image, and billing and payment."
CVPS, Vermont's largest utility with more than 158,000 customers, has 17 service quality measures known as SERVE standards. SERVE stands for Serving Everyone with Reliability, Value and Excellence.
The company measures and reports to state regulators on everything from how quickly customer care representatives answer phones to bill accuracy, customer service, outage numbers and duration, and safety. All Vermont utilities have specific service quality standards and must report the results regularly to state officials. Penalties can be imposed for failure to meet the standards.
In the Customer Information Center, employees answered 82.1 percent of calls within 20 seconds, beating the standard of 75 percent. That was despite several big storms, including last April's nor'icane, the biggest storm in company history, which knocked out service to 42 percent of CVPS's customers.
Other key measures:
92 percent of customers said they were satisfied following customer-initiated contact;
The complaint rate for 2007 was just 0.00696 percent, down from 0.01 percent in 2006, and well below the standard of 0.07 percent.
Just 0.0758 percent of bills were inaccurate.
Most critical to customers, CVPS met both of its reliability standards. The average customer lost service just 2.4 times, for an average duration of 2.6 hours, excluding major storms. The SERVE standards for reliability are an average of 2.5 outages lasting an average of 3.5 hours, excluding major storms.
Young said the company would continue to seek out new ways to improve reliability and customer service. "Our employees are focused every day on how to best serve our customers, and well be making substantial investments this year to further improve our service," Young said.