Three years after Jefferson County made history by being the first public utility in Washington in 60 years to go into the electric business, it's making history again with never-before-seen results of a customer satisfaction survey.

“There are more people who are marginally satisfied than very satisfied and it could be said more who are marginally dissatisfied,” said Dale Inkley of SDS Research, a national survey company based in Centerville, Utah, that specializes in utility company surveys.

The company was hired last fall to do a survey for Jefferson County Public Utility District 1 (PUD).

On a scale of 5 to 1 with 5 being very satisfied and 1 being dissatisfied, most people rated Jefferson County Public Utility District (PUD) somewhere in the middle, at 3, which Inkley said was unusual.

The survey was mailed to 18,000 electric customers last fall; 3,309 returned a paper survey, and 139 took the survey online, which gave the Utah company what it called a 95 percent confidence rate in the results.

Inkley said in a telephone interview that the questions were provided by the PUD, and the goal was to figure out if people felt that the public utility was providing better service than the private Puget Sound Energy, which sold its holdings in East Jefferson County to the PUD in 2013 for $109 million.

The survey questions, which were written by members of the Citizen Advisory Board appointed by PUD commissioners, produced unusual results, Inkley said.

“SDS has never done a survey where the distribution of responses is so heavily focused on middle ratings,” Inkley concluded in a summary. “The number of strongly agree and strongly disagree responses were very limited for all questions, meaning that respondents were either confused or had no defined opinion on the issue.

“This is the only survey in our history without a single NPI (net positive index) above 100,” Inkley wrote.

The survey produced 100 pages of comments, which SDS suggested that the PUD review.

Rates and billing were the issues most often referenced, with “the preponderance of responses dealing with perceived higher rates since the takeover and billing glitches that are being corrected.”

There were also comments about customers appreciating what is being done and customer service viewed as having improved since the takeover. Other customers indicated they had a negative view of customer service and employee interactions.

The survey itself – both the wording and the cost – was questioned.

The PUD paid $8,625 for the survey, half of the sum it anticipated because there were postal delivery glitches.

(The survey is posted with this story at ptleader.com and available at jeffpud.org.)

SURVEY DETAILS

While the fact that so many people took the survey was considered good news, from Inkley's perspective, the not-so-good news is that a lot of people may have been confused by what he called mirror surveys: Half of PUD customers received a survey that had nine questions worded in a positive way, and the other half received a survey that asked the same questions in a negative way.

For example, in Version 1 of the survey, the question was: “I think that the previous provider was more responsive to customer problems than JPUD is today.”

In Version 2 of the survey, the question was: “I think that JPUD is more responsive to customer problems than the previous provider.”

“The emphasis of your survey was to compare PUD with the previous provider, not to compare JPUD overall as a provider,” Inkley said.

He said the mirror-image survey – which he had never seen done – was puzzling and that respondents seemed confused by it.

Inkley said his company has done surveys of 50 different utilities in the past two years, and the benchmark for satisfaction is somewhere in the 150-160 NPI range.

In the PUD survey, there were no particular questions that Inkley thought could be compared to that benchmark.

Inkley was not sure why there were mirror surveys. PUD manager Jim Parker said the entire survey was vetted by a committee of the Citizen Advisory Board consisting of Stan Nealey, Dan Toepper, Tom Thiersch, Commissioner Ken Collins, and PUD staff member Annette Johnson and Bill Graham.

Thiersch said in an email on Monday, March 7 that everyone on the committee seemed to favor the two-version approach.

“The idea was to null-out the bias that's present in every survey. Asking the same question in 2 opposite ways should give you a more accurate result,” Thiersch wrote. He said the final wording was written by Commissioner Collins.

SURVEY VERSIONS

In Version 1, the most often cited positive statements were about PUD staff being courteous and helpful, service being reliable and friendly, and appreciation for the line technicians who are “out there daily.”

Negative comments were about poor service or unreliability, indifferent and unhelpful customer service staff, and a desire to improve communication.

Neutral comments involved a desire for the billing cycle to be standardized and a desire to speak to a person during a power outage.

In Version 2, positive comments again listed customer service staff being wonderful, while response times for outage were cited as being abysmal. Neutral comments had to do with credit card or bank account payments, and the need for broadband and to invest in new technologies.

HIGHEST RATINGS

The one question that did receive the highest NPI rating had to do with whether the PUD should invest in new technologies such as broadband, community solar power and electric vehicle chargers.

It received a NPI of 71.

While some might think that a high NPI means that the question had the highest positive rating, Inkley wrote an in email, “NOTHING (sic) in this survey could be considered 'strongly agree.' There are more 'bottom box' ratings (5) for Question 9. Strongly agree would be the Top Box ratings. The numbers for this question are 22 percent for top box and 52 percent for bottom box. That means that 30 percent more respondents chose bottom box than top box.

“While it is true that this question receives the highest rating on the survey, they cannot be considered to be strongly agree," he wrote. "The question also lists three main components (which was confusing to most respondents). They are solar, broadband, and charging stations for electric cars. While there were competing comments (positive and negative) about each component, broadband and solar received the most positive support. There was little support for charging stations.”

“In plain English, the overall tone of the survey is negative for most respondent ratings. The LEAST (sic) negative is the issue of JPUD investing in new technologies,” he wrote in an email follow-up.

Overall, in version 1, there were 807 comments: 175 (21.7 percent) were positive, 327 (40.5 percent) were negative, and 305 (37.8 percent) were neutral.

In Version 2, there were 855 comments: 176 (20.6 percent) were positive, 322 (37.7 percent) were negative, and 357 (41.7 percent) were neutral.

POST OFFICE

The Jefferson County survey also involved a first for the national survey company in another way: It was the first time the U.S. Postal Service lost the surveys for a number of weeks.

A subcontracting mailing company printed the survey to mail with a paid return postage envelope included. But the post office in Salt Lake City didn't send it out and initially said it didn't have the surveys, Inkley said.

“We've never had a problem like this before,” Inkley said.

Inkley said the company has a philosophy that it wants to help customers accomplish their goals.

“Ultimately, we do what the customer wants to accomplish. Your people came to us with a survey that had been created. I'm not sure what they tried to accomplish with a mirror-image survey. There is some limited experience in that area. The survey was created and given to us, and we essentially facilitated and implemented it and then ran into problems with the post office,” Inkley said.

Inkley declined to say whether he thought the survey ought to be redone because of the mirror-image issue.

NO INCENTIVE

Inkley also said he was impressed with the 100 pages of comments that PUD customers offered and he was amazed that there were so many people who did comment without having an incentive to do so.

“That is very amazing, very amazing, based on that there was no incentive,” he told the Leader.

He said that, in Illinois, for example, 22 utilities – all cooperatives – had done a survey, and each one had offered five $100 credits to be put in a raffle for respondents to potentially win just for completing the survey.

The fact that the PUD here got five times the number of people to respond to its survey without offering some incentive was impressive, Inkley said, and it did “fly in the face” of his previous comments about how odd was that so many respondents were giving the PUD low marks.

“That tells us that people were anxious to respond,” he said of the high turnout, followed by his conclusion that the company remained puzzled, having “never had this kind of response.”