Series:

Water Research Foundation Report

2 total works

Cover of Benchmarking Water Utility Customer Relations Best Practices
Customer satisfaction is important to water utilities to minimize customer complaints, maintain goodwill towards the utility, and increase public support for utility improvement initiatives. To date, there has been little guidance for water utilities regarding best practices in customer relations or associated metrics. This project sought to: identify customer relations best practices from other relevant organizations, identify metrics for both internal performance tracking and external comparison, and develop tools that will enable water utilities to improve customer relations, with the ultimate goal of improving customer satisfaction and utility efficiency. This project focused on call centers, meter reading, billing, payment processing, credit and collections, and customer-related field and meter services. The project also documented best practices and associated metrics from both within and outside the water industry. The main potential impact of the project is in the comprehensive web-based toolkit that was developed.

Cover of A Strategic Assessment of the Future of Water Utilities
In 2000, three trends papers, grouped as societal, business, and utility categories, were written to provide context for expert workshops. These trend documents were updated and compiled into a single trend document that provides the data supporting the trend as well as potential implications for the trends. This critical briefing document was created to prepare participants for a Futures Workshop. The workshop identified the most important trends and strategies. The study resulted in six trend papers that were published in Journal AWWA. This study will provide water utility managers with current strategic planning information to help develop strategies for future utility success. The trend papers can serve as resource documents to identify the environmental factors that will affect a given utility in the future. Other local factors must also be considered, but the trends documented here will likely be in play at most utilities. The results of the research can comprise a significant part of the "environmental scan" element of traditional strategic planning as well as give guidance to water utilities regarding potential strategies to better position the utility for future success.