According to a phone survey completed by a third party, Owensboro Municipal Utilities achieved a 94% overall satisfaction rating for Fiscal Year 2022. Officials said they were proud to have such positive feedback from the community.
Sonya Dixon, Communications and Public Relations Manager, said OMU received a 92% rating for the previous Fiscal Year, and that it usually hovers around 93%.
She told OMU Commissioners during their meeting Thursday they should be pleased with jumping up 2 percentage points.
“I cannot state how strongly we should be proud of that,” Dixon said. “For a utility to receive that level of satisfaction in the current climate … is just amazing. This calculates for all areas. This is electric, water and telecommunications all rolled into one.”
Dixon said there are three factors that are primary components in customer satisfaction: reliability, interaction, and rates.
While the overall satisfaction remained high, there were a few categories where the responses shifted significantly from “excellent” to “good” quality of service.
For example, the “Transaction” category rating went from 80% excellent and 14% good in 2021, to 61% and 31% respectively in 2022. So, the overall satisfaction actually increased from 92% to 94%, but there was a swing in the specific breakdown of responses.
Similarly, the ratings for “Employee(s) Who Assisted During Transaction” and “Length of Time for Transaction Resolution” went up slightly overall but had large dropoffs in excellent responses.
Dixon said that was largely due to new hires interacting with customers, combined with OMU lifting the suspension of connections as the pandemic restrictions went away.
Data for the survey was gathered by a group called Skybase, while the reporting, analysis, and survey development was provided by Comer Research. There is a 3.8% margin of error in the results.
In other business, OMU commissioners received an external audit report from Stan Syra with Riney Hancock CPAs. Syra said the audit went smoothly and there were no issues.
