When it comes to customer service, Clark Public Utilities is playing in the big leagues.
The low-profile public utility, which provides electric and water services to county residents, is ranked with Amazon, Apple, Lexus and Southwest Airlines as one of the nation’s “2014 Customer Champions” in a survey by J.D. Power & Associates, a market research firm. Clark Public Utilities also ranked No. 1 in 2013 for customer service among midsize Western utilities.
The recognition is noteworthy in its consistency over time — the utility has won the Customer Champions award three times and topped the customer service list for comparable utilities for six consecutive years. The Customer Champions award is particularly rewarding because utilities are not generally leaders in customer service. By definition, they serve a captive customer base with no other choices for electricity or water. In such an environment, it’s easy for management and employees to become complacent or worse in dealing with a sometimes demanding public.
Wayne Nelson, CEO and general manager of Clark Public Utilities since 1999, says his industry has taken note of Clark Public Utilities’ customer service focus.
“We’re asked a couple times a month by utilities across the country how we do what we do,” Nelson said. “They want to understand how we do it — but they don’t know how to do it.”
Nelson offers an example of how to refocus thinking in his industry: most utilities work on developing procedures to speed up the process of shutting off customers for nonpayment of bills. “We go to conferences and say we pride ourselves on not shutting anybody off,” Nelson said.
J.D. Power bases its survey on five key measures, which it calls “touch points.” In simple terms, those points are people, presentation, process, product and price. In the case of Clark Public Utilities, the measures cover everything from its response to power outages to community involvement to its handling of customer phone calls. The utility provides electricity to 185,000 customers and water to 30,000 of those customers.
Nelson and other utility officials are quick to say that they have no silver-bullet reason for reaching the top service standards, even when measured against top-notch retailers, including luxury brands. But they say they drive home a consistent message: creating a culture that truly honors customers derives, in part, from top-level support within an organization. Additionally, a strong hiring process and solid day-to-day work procedures — coupled with recognition and rewards for those who breathe life into that process and those procedures — go a long way toward maintaining a culture that puts customers first.
“You empower employees and never criticize them for doing something on behalf of a customer,” Nelson said. “They did the right thing if they did what’s best for the customer.”
Basic value
An ethic of treating customers well would seem to be a basic value of any organization that depends on customers for its existence, especially in retail trade. Yet everyone has experienced rude treatment at the hands of businesses, utilities and government. It turns out that good customer service is not as easy as it seems.
Kathy Condon, a business coach and former Clark County resident now living in Palm Springs, Calif., offers examples of customer service efforts that seem to be add-ons rather than built into a company’s culture. She conducts her own informal tests on whether casual kindnesses to customers are more than skin deep.
Often, she’s found, if your answer to a “How are you?” question deviates from a rote answer, employees simply don’t know how to respond. She once responded to a Safeway employee: “Not very good … why do you ask?” His response: “We’re told to ask that question.”
Russ Beacock, co-owner of Vancouver’s Beacock Music, says the popular store knows that strong customer service is vital in selling products that are available from countless sources. Beacock says he prefers the term “customer experience” to customer service, and says that experience is his store’s chief draw in a highly competitive market.
“It’s not just saying hello when they walk in,” he said. “We want (customers), when they walk out the door, to say ‘That’s great.’ ” Beacock Music was recognized last year by the National Association of Music Merchants as retailer of the year, a high honor in an industry with more than 4,000 retailers. He uses the word “obsessed” to describe the attitude he and Gayle Beacock, his sister and the store’s co-owner, have about their effort to maintain strong customer service.
Maintaining that standard is “constant and it’s daily,” he said. “I use the word obsessed and I don’t use that lightly. We truly believe that’s all we have.”
The experiences of the Beacocks, Condon and Clark Public Utilities underscore an important fact: though public agencies and private companies vary wildly in what they do and whom they serve, they share common principles and offer universal lessons to which any organization would do well to pay attention.
Condon agrees with Nelson’s emphasis on empowering employees to make decisions, something she says is not embraced in much of the retail industry. “Clerks have not been given the right to make customers happy,” she said.
She also worries that a younger generation of workers has little experience with good customer service, unless they shop at Nordstrom or the relatively few outlets that value excellent service. “Younger people haven’t seen what good customer service looks like,” she believes.
No outsourcing
Nelson says Clark Public Utilities has found Nordstrom and other service-oriented companies to be excellent sources of employees.
He names Les Schwab Tire Centers, many airlines and credit unions as companies that focus on good customer service.
“We hire a lot of people from the same organizations,” he says. “People bring that skill set or attitude into the interview.”
The utility tells workers to follow up on issues they hear about in the community, even if they aren’t part of their job description. It rewards them for good customer service: Having a “customer service attitude” can lead to recognition among peers and result in an increase in annual leave or compensation.
The utility takes particular pride in maintaining 24-hour call centers, staffed by its own employees rather than being outsourced. Its two customer service centers, in downtown Vancouver and in Orchards, have a daytime staff of 50 to 60 full-time employees on weekdays, a dozen or so on weekends, and a single responder at night. Another nine employees field calls from their homes. And calls are answered by real people, not recordings.
Erica Erland, corporate communications manager for Clark Public Utilities, notes that the utility has not considered outsourcing. “It’s just not part of our culture,” she said. Employees are given the freedom to problem-solve, she said. “We don’t take every case and put it into a policy or a procedure,” she said.
Lena Wittler, senior communications manager for the utility, says the online and phone-based surveys by J.D. Power typically reveal areas for improvement. This year, for instance, the utility was surprised to learn that customer awareness of energy-saving programs was among the lowest in its peer group, and that it was far below the industry average in returning phone calls to customers who reported a power outage. Clark returned 4 percent of such calls, compared to an industry average of 12 percent for personal or automated return calls. Clark Public Utilities instituted a system in November to ramp up its return calls. “We were falling behind in that category,” Wittler said.
To Erland, the finding on return phone calls is “an example of how we learn from this research and get better. Customer expectations only get higher.”
