Why customers give Duke Energy low marks
Duke utilities took three of the four bottom spots among 13 utilities rated:
Power's
"Customers hear the stories in the news media and they remember these things for awhile," said Conklin, vice president of utilities and infrastructure practice. "It sort of lingers in the mind of the consumers for a period of time. It will recover."
All four Duke utilities -- including a sixth-place ranking in the Midwest -- improved their scores from a year ago, Conklin added. Duke is among the nation's leading utilities in the key metric of alerting customers about power outages, he said, and in the South competes with a "tough group" of high performers.
Duke acknowledges that it needs to improve. Spokeswoman
"We've worked to reduce costs while building a smarter, cleaner energy infrastructure," Layne said. "We've improved communications and now offer customers proactive notification and updates about power outages, as well as usage alerts when we believe their energy usage for the month is trending 30 percent higher than the previous month."
Nationally, overall satisfaction with electric providers has risen for four straight years,
Still, electric utilities still lag far behind other industries, including auto insurers, retail banking and airlines.
Power's electric utility rankings measure power quality and reliability; price; billing and payment; corporate citizenship; communications and customer service in its ratings.
Ratings released in May by the American Customer Satisfaction Index, at the
Duke ranked near the bottom of the 26 investor-owned utilities scored. It also showed the steepest plunge in customer satisfaction among those utilities since 1994, when the surveys began.
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