Customers rank Duke Energy low in new report. Here’s how it’s working to improve.
Duke Energy has again ranked near the bottom among big electric utilities in the U.S. for residential customer satisfaction, according to a report released on Tuesday.
Charlotte-based Duke’s score of 70 also represents a 4 percent decline from last’s year report, according to the results released by the American Customer Satisfaction Index, a Michigan-based firm that tracks customer satisfaction across a range of industries.
Duke was among about two dozen investor-owned energy utilities included in Tuesday’s report, which scores companies on a 100-point scale based on customer interviews.
Some other utilities posted declines in the report, Duke spokesman Tim Pettit said. He noted that last year Duke sought to increase customer rates in North Carolina, including in its territory that covers Charlotte.
“Those are never popular with our customers but often times necessary just the same,” he said.
For its part, Duke is beginning to use a new tool that will provide the company with feedback from customers that it can use to improve their experience, Pettit said.
The decline at Duke came as customer satisfaction with the overall energy utilities sector fell 2.7 percent to a score of 73.2, Tuesday’s report showed.
“Higher prices and extreme weather are the biggest culprits behind this sector-wide drop in customer satisfaction,” David VanAmburg, ACSI managing director, said in a news release. Customers are also upset with a decline in electric power reliability, VanAmburg said.
“The energy utilities sector needs to take a hard look in the mirror, as the pressure mounts to upgrade and strengthen the grid,” he said.
Among the investor-owned utilities, CenterPoint Energy, based in Houston, scored the highest at 80, down from 82 the year before.
The report examined three types of energy utilities: investor-owned, municipal and cooperative.
Results for the entire report were based on interviews with 21,646 residential customers chosen at random and contacted via email between Jan. 16, 2018 and Dec. 25, ACSI said.
This story was originally published March 19, 2019 at 2:32 PM.
