CVPS surpasses quality standards for seventh straight year

Central Vermont Public Service (NYSE-CV) met all of its service quality standards in 2010, the seventh straight year the company achieved that goal ‘ the best record in Vermont.
‘Service quality and reliability are critical to our customers and drive us every day,’ President Bob Young said. ‘Employees make a tremendous effort to provide customers with high-quality service, and they measure that effort every day through our SERVE standards.’
SERVE stands for Serving Everyone with Reliability, Value and Excellence. CVPS, Vermont’s largest utility with about 159,000 customers, has 17 SERVE standards. 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, CVPS answered 82.07 percent of calls within 20 seconds last year, beating the standard of 75 percent.
Other key measures from 2010:
* 91 percent of customers said they were satisfied following customer-initiated contact, compared to a national rate of 85 percent.
* The complaint rate was just 0.00313 percent, just a fraction of the standard, which is 0.07 percent.
* Just 0.0893 percent of bills were inaccurate.
Despite one of the most rugged, rural service territories in the country, the average customer lost service just 2.2 times, for an average duration of 2.7 hours, excluding major storms. The SERVE standards for reliability are an average of 2.5 outages lasting an average of 3.5 hours each, excluding major storms.
According to the latest J.D. Power and Associates survey of electric utility customers, CVPS ranked No. 1 in the East Midsize segment for customer service, second for corporate citizenship and third for communications. CVPS’s score for customer service was 769, compared to a segment average of 688.
Source: CVPS. 2.7.2011