Last night PA Consulting Group, the management, systems and technology consultancy, announced the winners of its annual ReliabilityOne™ and ServiceOne™ Awards at a reception in Miami, Florida. The ReliabilityOne™ awards are given annually to utilities that have excelled in delivering reliable electric service to their customers, while the ServiceOne™ awards recognize utilities for providing exceptional service to their customers as determined by a set of 19 objective measures of excellence in customer care, identified by a panel of industry experts.
Newark, NJ-based Public Service Electric & Gas (PSE&G) received the ReliabilityOne™ Award for the Mid-Atlantic Region and also took home the National Achievement award. PSE&G is a five-time winner of the Mid-Atlantic Region and a two-time winner of the National Achievement award. PSE&G is a regulated utility delivering electric service to 2.1 million customers and gas service to 1.7 million customers throughout New Jersey.
Regional award winners also included:
San Diego Gas & Electric, a Sempra Energy utility serving 3.3 million consumers in San Diego and southern Orange counties won the ReliabilityOne™ Award for the West Region.
Consolidated Edison Company of New York, which serves more than 9 million residents in the New York metro area, won the ReliabilityOne™ Award for the Northeast Region.
We Energies, which serves electric, natural gas, water, and steam customers in portions of Wisconsin and Michigan won the ReliabilityOne™ Award for the Midwest Region.
Orlando Utilities Commission, a municipally owned public utility providing water and electric service to the City of Orlando and adjoining portions of Orange County, won the ReliabilityOne™ Award for the Southeast Region.
Roseville Electric, based in Roseville, CA, a suburb of Sacramento, was the recipient of the Community Utility ReliabilityOne™ Award. This award is given to a utility that primarily serves a single community of fewer than 250,000 customers.
“We have an outstanding group of winners from across the country,” said Jeff Lewis, PA’s ReliabilityOne Program Director. “Each utility distinguished itself for its commitment to delivering outstanding reliability to customers and the overall 2005 performance is the best I’ve seen since we began the program more than six years ago. The focus on reliability from utilities and regulators alike has really driven industry performance.”
All utilities operating electric delivery networks in North America are eligible for consideration for the ReliabilityOne™ award. PA collects reliability data from public and private sources to determine preliminary regional winners. Once preliminary winners are chosen, each utility undergoes an on-site certification process, which provides an independent review of the policies, processes and systems used to collect, analyze and report a company's reliability results.
PA also recognized those utilities that excel in the area of customer service and care with the presentation of the ServiceOne™ awards. The 2006 ServiceOne™ award winners are:
Florida Power & Light, which serves 4.4 million customers throughout Florida
Progress Energy, an electric utility that serves approximately 3 million customers in North Carolina, South Carolina and Florida
NorthWestern Energy, an electricity and natural gas utility that serves customers in Montana, South Dakota and Nebraska
“Across the electric utility industry, companies face challenges to provide premium service in an environment that is complicated by a changing economy, rising commodity prices and increases in the cost of providing service,” said Mike Hormell, PA’s ServiceOne Program Director. “In this environment winners of the ServiceOne™ award truly are leaders in their field for having the ability to provide superior service and meet the needs of their customer base on a daily basis.”
The award is designed to quantitatively define and reward excellent customer service through the use of 19 measures selected by PA’s industry advisory group of experts to represent all aspect of customer service. These performance measures all fall within the following key utility customer service activities: call center, billing, meter reading, field service, and credit and collections. PA uses performance data collected through the firm’s Customer Service Benchmarking Program and a review of best practices to vet all nominees.
Prior to the ReliabilityOne and ServiceOne awards ceremony, PA held its inaugural Utility Performance Leadership Forum, hosted and sponsored by Florida Power & Light, which brought utility executives and their next generation leaders together to discuss utility industry issues, hot topics, and best practices.
