Study: Customer Engagement Leads to Brand Trust for Utilities

Customer EngagementMarketers around the globe want to use intelligent customer engagement to build brand trust.

According to the Residential Utility Trusted Brand & Customer Engagement study, that has happened for utilities. The study, which was published by Cogent Reports, the syndicated division of Market Strategies International, reveals that brand trust increased by 29 points to 685 (on a 1,000-point scale) over 2014, which also measures the overall customer engagement relationship.

Brand Trust—a core component of Cogents’ Engaged Customer RelationshipTM model—comprises the factors of company reputation & advocacy, customer focus, community support, communication effectiveness, environmental dedication and reliable quality.

Among the factors comprising Brand Trust, customer focus and company reputation & advocacy improved the most over last year. But, environmental dedication showed the least improvement among factors.

“Brand trust is the cornerstone of a utility relationship,” said Chris Oberle, senior vice president at Market Strategies. “Brand trust not only makes customers more satisfied, it also produces positive financial results and makes customers less likely to want regulators to exert increased supervision over their utility.”

What’s more, the study shows that improving operations will not likely make customers happier. In fact, operational satisfaction scores do not improve even when customers have had no outages or safety events, while also never having heard of a rate increase.

“We found that most utilities performing at the bottom of customer satisfaction rankings actually have good operations, but are rated lowly by customers because they just don’t trust these utilities to do the right thing,” added Oberle.

Building a trusted relationship with customers is also essential to the adoption of value-added utility offerings, such as energy consumption management and other enhanced services and mandates, the study says.

Nearly 40% of customers with low brand trust want “more active utility oversight of their utility,” while half of that amount want increased regulator intervention if they have high utility brand trust, according to the study.

At the same time, state regulators and public utility commissions are constantly searching for ways to have customers accept higher rates for improved environmental and other mandates.

“Without a good level of brand trust among the utilities they oversee, regulators will continue to meet extreme customer and community resistance against their directives,” Oberle said. “It’s simple: Customers like dealing with companies they trust and push back on offerings from companies that are not trusted advisers.”

The study names 40 utilities among the 125 covered as the 2015 Most Trusted Brands. Cogent Reports conducted surveys among 25,812 residential electric, natural gas, and combination utility customers of the 125 largest U.S. utility companies (based on residential customer counts.

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