No, Obama is not paying your utility bills

By Jeff Postelwait
Online Editor

Presidents promise a lot, particularly in an election year, but President Barack Obama is apparently getting credit for delivering on a promise he never made — namely, paying people's utility bills.

Major utilities like PG&E, Westar Energy and SDG&E have posted some announcements in recent days to alert customers of a "nationwide scam." It seems imposter utility workers are going door to door with promises that the president has started a program by which customers can obtain credits to pay for their utility bills. The scammers, as usual, are sniffing around for people's personal information, like Social Security numbers and the like, in the furtherance of other scams.

Obviously, utilities don't want their good names tarnished by some phishing fiasco, so several of them are doing what they can to spread the word that there is no such government program, and that you should always confirm that someone claiming to be a utility worker is legitimate before handing over any personal information.

Also par for the course when it comes to con artists, the main targets appear to be elderly people. The scammers, according to reports, make their contacts door to door, by phone or online and ask for the customer's information. After they get that, they give the customer a fake bank routing number (not unlike the notorious "Nigerian prince" identity theft scams) where the customer can make payments. They are promised credit on that account, but the payment makes its way to the scammer's pockets, and not to any utility company.

So... basically be on your guard, and beware of phony utility workers bearing gifts. It's not a bad idea in an election year to take everything with a larger than usual grain of salt.

Study to electric utilities: Tell businesses the truth

J.D. Power and Associates released a report today on business customers’ reactions to power outages and outage management. While a bit happier and less emotional, overall, than their residential counterparts, there still seems to be a lesson in all these numbers: Dear utility, don’t shorten the outage time.

The J.D. Power and Associates 2011 Electric Utility Business Customer Satisfaction Study is based on interviews with people from 17,000 U.S. businesses that spend $500-$50,000 a month on those power bills. Those study Associates measured customer satisfaction looking at: power quality and reliability; billing and payment; corporate citizenship; price; communications; and, of course, customer service.

If the surveyed business had an outage, the average satisfaction rating was 729 out of 1,000 points---about a middling “C” grade for those of us still judging things based on old school report cards. And that “C” was only if the power clicked back on by the time told them. If the utility stretched the outage (for whatever reason, even those beyond their control) past the hour given by the utility, that grade plummeted to 576. (That’s a whopping 150-point plunge, and an “F” on the school report card scale.)

So, the lesson here: Be accurate. Tell the truth. Don’t give the best-guess estimate. The customer wants to know when it’s really going to be back up and making them money again. If it’s going to be a long time, be honest. And, let them know why.

The survey noted: Among business customers who contact their utility for information about an outage, satisfaction levels are highest among those who received at least three points of information. Satisfaction is lowest among customers who only received one piece of information.

“While causes of power outages may be outside the control of electric providers, they do have the ability to establish highly satisfying procedures for making adequate outage information available to customers,” said Jeff Conklin, senior director of the energy utility practice at J.D. Power and Associates. “Particularly for business customers, time is money. Providing accurate and comprehensive information about outages can help these customers make contingency plans and effectively plan resumption of their operations.”

The second lesson here: The customers expect you to know. True, you may not have the shiny smart grid intelligence to even get a bead on where the outage is without sending out some guys in a truck to just drive around the darkened spots. But, customers don’t know that. They hear a lot about the smart grid; they think you have one. They think there’s a robot or magic computer connection on that line. They believe that the very moment power goes out, you know. And they also believe you should know how long it takes to get that power back on. Whether or not you think that’s fair, that’s the business world you’re working in these days.

The study also noted a decline in overall satisfaction among business people with their power companies---not much, about four points, but that decline happened across a number of areas with the biggest dips in power quality and reliability (7 points) and customer service (5 points). Do you really have worse power than you did last year? Of course not. Do you have worse customer service? Perhaps. Either way, what’s important here is, again, what customers believe. They believe you know more than you are saying about outages. They believe your power is not as awesome as it was before, and they think your customer service isn’t so hot.

You can fix those beliefs with some extra time and extra communication, but the key is to be truthful and accurate---even letting them know when you don’t know. Sometimes honesty really is the best policy.

FROM THE ARCHIVES: Customer Service is Key

The biggest splash in the Internet world this week here in the U.S. of A. is Canadian band Sons of Maxwell. Apparently, a year ago, the band flew United Airlines and United managed to break the lead singer’s prize Taylor guitar, and those aren’t cheap. After a year of phone calls and getting the wild-goose runaround from call centers and service agents, the band wrote a song and filmed a video about their experience rather directly titled “United Breaks Guitars.” (Pop that title into You Tube, and you’ll get the video. But, I warn you: That song will be stuck in your head all day.)

Now, this amusing little tidbit on bad customer service and how it can come back to bite a company in the tokhes, reminded me of a local problem here in Oklahoma from a few years ago.

You see, airlines aren’t the only people with bad customer service and problematic call centers and service agents. Utilities often have similar issue.

Here in Tulsa, around 2003, an irate customer got so angry with the local gas utility Oklahoma Natural Gas---commonly referred to as just ONG---that he started a website titled ONGSucks.com. Not only did he start a website, he started a campaign. There were billboards all over the city that advertised the website and encouraged visitors to the site. He spent money from his own pocket (as Sons of Maxwell did with United) to “fight the Man,” as it were.

There were local news stories about the onslaught. There were barbs back and forth. The website was taken down only to be replaced with an ONGStillSucks.com website and new round of billboards. Now, both of those sites are defunct in 2009, but it plagued ONG for years, and it’s an incident that is still remembered, fondly, by Tulsans. Seriously, it was funny. And, we’d all felt his pain because we’d all been in a position where we felt belittled and without options trying to fix or complain about a service we can’t go without.

A lot of times people in necessary service industries---hospitals, airlines, utilities---have a rough and tumble mindset. Since those services are necessary, and they’re usually a form of local monopoly without serious competition, they adopt a surly, bully ‘tude, a “We’re Necessary, So You’ll Just Take What We Dish Out” response. But customer service is key, whether you’re selling eggs or electrons.

In the Jan/Feb 2009 issue of Electric Light & Power magazine, author Cynthia White noted that “until recently, consumers did not hold utilities to the same customer service standards they held other businesses.” But, she also noted that those old attitudes are changing, and it’s time for utilities to be more focused on the consumer as a customer. In the same issue, Jerry Duvall, CEO of CS Week, noted the “strategic importance of improving the customer experience.”

Granted, with electric and gas service---and sometimes airlines---you don’t really have a lot of (or any) options to change your service provider. But, as our ONG Sucks guy and our United Breaks Guitars band prove: Where there’s a will---and passionate, pent-up annoyance--- there’s a way. A happy consumer doesn’t post You Tube videos or plaster hate speech on billboards. And, to quote Martha Stewart, that’s a good thing.