Redefining Great Customer Service in Year 2020

About the Program

Category: Community and Economic Development (Best in Category)

Year: 2021

Customer Operations Section, a new normal began by exploring the process of employees teleworking and benchmarking with other local utilities as a method for identifying opportunities for improvement in customer service and in our daily processes during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. During the pandemic (March – December), our Customer Operations provided yearly account services to approximately 8,408 walk-in customers to pay their bills and 4,923 applied in person for new connections. The customers (builders and developers) that were applying for new connections increased from 2019. This part of our business wasn’t impacted from the pandemic based on our statistics. The building of new residential homes and businesses didn’t change. Also, during COVID-19, we helped 2,118 walk-in customers inquiring about billing issues. We received 76,347 calls in our call center which is a slightly lower call volume from 2019 of 100,019 calls. We received 17,534 calls from our information line.During the pandemic, our thinking of how we serve our customers was adjusted and modified. This included a complete benchmarking with other local utilities regarding the guidelines that were provided by the commonwealth of Virginia Government and understanding those guidelines. Communication became the key factors between local utilities on how to handle new procedures and processes. We identified the changes that we needed to make in our walk-in process, collection process, field operations process, and overall changes on how we do business. Each locality was faced with hurdles in this new way of doing business and wanting support from each other by asking each other questions on the guidelines that the state had implemented.