There's a new power surging through the world of electric utilities. It is customer power.
And we're all feeling the jolt of this force. We feel it in large customers' demands for prices that help them to compete in the world economy. We feel it in small-business customers' demands for products and prices that reflect their true needs. We feel it in residential customers' impatience over the disparity in service and price from one neighborhood to the next.
Most importantly, we feel the force of consumer power in our market research. This research tells us plainly and convincingly that customers no longer are satisfied with a monopoly system for delivering electricity to their homes and businesses. They want to choose their supplier. They expect, and enjoy, such choice in all other purchases, and they are increasingly clear in their decision to seek the same options for electricity.
| For dairy farmers in Vermont, improving energy efficiency is one important way to be more profitable. GMP gave John Forgues financial incentives to install an energy-efficient milk pre-cooler and efficient lighting at his farm in Vergennes. GMP helped 90 percent of the farmers in our service area analyze the energy efficiency of their operations, and completed energy-efficiency installations on more than 70 percent of those farms. |
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GMP has heard these voices and we are responding. We're leading Vermont's efforts to construct a new system that allows maximum choice to retail customers. We expect this restructuring work to bear fruit in 1998.
In the meantime, we're responding to this surge of consumer power every day in several different ways. We now court our largest customers directly, with account representatives who, like their counterparts in other businesses, understand their customers' industries as well as they know the electric utility industry.
We are conducting customer research, learning face-to-face in real time what they want and how they want it delivered. This is work that only a few years ago would have been considered not only unnecessary, but downright wasteful.
We're operating tightly targeted energy-management programs that provide immediate, direct, measurable benefits to customers in forms that they can see and appreciate each month.
We are vigorously pursuing technological innovations that provide additional direct benefit to customers, and toward that end we have created a research and development component as part of our continuing association with Hydro-Qubec, which invests $120 million a year in this work.
We have completely reorganized our Company to focus the operations pieces more narrowly on customers and to streamline the routine processes, such as connecting new accounts, that affect customers most directly.
Customer power lies behind all of these initiatives, and our favorability rating of 90 percent among our customers shows how they have responded during a period when on average, less than 70 percent of the customers in the United States hold a favorable opinion of their electric company.
But while the idea of customer choice is new to our industry, the value of customer service is not, at least for GMP. What other industry's goal is uninterrupted, full-power service to customers 24 hours a day, 365 days a year? GMP's customers enjoyed ininterruped service 99.9 percent of the time in 1995. What other business sends out repair crews in sub-zero weather, night or day, workday or holiday? In a state that is 80 percent forested and routinely gets eight feet of snow a year, the average power outage in GMP territory was 1.5 hours for 1995.
These are values, measurements of customer service, that are as old as GMP itself. And these values will not change under restructuring. They are, we believe, the values that create customer loyalty and customer loyalty is an asset that can only become more valuable as customer power increases.
