Bay City Light and Power gets positive rating in community survey

BAY CITY, MI – A community survey will help Bay City Light and Power make decisions related to customer service and conservation efforts for the future.

Key findings from the survey were presented to the Bay City Commission by Director of Light and Power Jay Anderson during the city’s Monday, March 3, finance and policy meeting.

“Like any good market research study, there’s good things, there’s things to improve on, there’s things to research,” Anderson said.

The electric utility partnered with GreatBlue Research, Inc., for the project. The company specializes in utility research and has worked with utility and public works entities across the country.

Great Blue stated during the project that they would maintain the anonymity of respondents.

The customer satisfaction side of the project focused on the service offered and the subsequent price and reliability, while the conservation side of thing focused on energy waste reduction, resource power mix, and load control. Data was collected for the project through telephone/online surveys in November 2019.

Data collected was broken down between residential and commercial utility customers within Bay City limits, with 403 residential customers responding to survey requests via telephone and 308 filling out an online questionnaire. For the commercial side of things, 100 customers were surveyed via telephone only.

Here are the overall satisfaction ratings percentages that surveyed customers gave the Bay City electric department:

Communication with customers: 77.7%

Responding to customer questions and complaints: 80.7%

Helping customers use less electricity: 72.3%

Being open and honest about operations and policies: 77.3%

Maintaining reliable electric service: 72.8%

Providing good service and value for the cost: 72.8%

Community involvement 77.0%

Overall: 79.7%

The national public power overall satisfaction rating average is 70.5%, so Bay City’s department scored higher than average with residential customers.

“When you look at the overall ratings, what drove it, a lot of it was we maintained reliable service….Very good results, lot’s of positives, a few things that we can change and we can always get better,” Anderson said.

Commissioner Jesse Dockett commended the department’s reliability.

“That reliability is awesome, I’m not even afraid of it, like when the storms happen and stuff, I’m not even afraid of losing it,” he said.

The commercial side of the survey looked fairly similar number wise. Here’s the breakdown of the rankings from commercial customers:

Communication with customers: 80.6%

Responding to customer questions and complaints: 76.1%

Helping customers use less electricity: 63.5%

Being open and honest about operations and policies: 75.6%

Maintaining reliable electric service: 78.8%

Providing good service and value for the cost: 69.8%

Community involvement: 68.5%

Overall: 78%

The department also hosted a series of vegetation management focus groups with the public earlier in 2020 as a part of this market research push. Anderson said that the research collected from these events will be available at a later date.

Commissioner Kerice Basmadjian said that she attended one of the sessions and saw it as beneficial.

“I definitely learned some things myself being there and I appreciate that you’re doing that that and doing all this, because I think it’s really important to really target our customers and see what they’re thinking,” she said.

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