From CSAT Scores to Customer Confidence

Executive Summary

Participants discussed moving beyond customer satisfaction scores to better understand trust, perception, reliability, affordability, communication, and the overall customer relationship. Several organizations are adding or shifting to broader measures because satisfaction alone does not explain what is driving customer views or what operational teams should act on.

A second theme was connecting customer feedback to operational data. Participants described linking customer measures to outages, billing, payments, call volumes, digital use, and affordability needs. They also discussed the difficulty of separating what the organization can directly improve from broader factors such as price, weather events, media coverage, and community conditions.

Key Takeaways

• Satisfaction alone is not enough. Participants are using or exploring broader measures that include trust, brand, service, and product experience.

• Trust is becoming a key measure. Billing accuracy, reliability, customer service, and communication were all discussed as factors that influence trust.

• Operational data can make customer measures more useful. Participants are linking customer scores with billing, payments, outages, call activity, and other operating data to better understand what is influencing results.

• Repeated outages can materially affect customer relationship scores. One participant described using outage frequency to identify areas where operational work may need to be prioritized.

• Different customers value different things. Digital experience, service quality, reliability, and trust may carry different weight across customer groups.

• Transactional satisfaction and overall perception are different. Outages and service interactions can strongly affect transaction scores, while price and affordability can have a greater effect on overall perception.

• Affordability is difficult to separate from perception. Participants noted that broader financial conditions can shape how customers view the utility even when bills are competitive.

• Communication matters. Participants discussed both the impact of going quiet and the risk of communication that feels self-focused. Clearer, more useful communication was seen as important to trust.

• Customer insight is starting to move into operating routines. Examples included asking who will be affected by a change, where the impact will occur, which channels are involved, and how customers should be informed.

• Some organizations are shifting attention from the metric to the customer feedback behind it. One example involved restructuring an internal review process around customer insight and journey information rather than one overall score.

• Cross-functional teams are being used to act on customer issues. One participant described small teams meeting weekly to address specific customer problems and focus on high-value, lower-effort improvements.

• Proactive affordability outreach is one example of action from insight. Participants described using customer data to identify people who may need payment extensions or other support before they fall further behind.

Rob Earle

First Quartile Consulting

315.944.7610

Rob.Earle@1QConsulting.com