After falling to Green Mountain Energy last year in the annual J.D. Power & Associates award for customer satisfaction, Champion Energy has regained the top spot in the coveted customer survey. Congratulations Champion Energy Services! This marks Champion Energy’s 5th finish at the top of the survey in the the past 6 years.
Green Mountain Energy followed up their 1st place finish in 2014 with a strong 2nd place finish in 2015. Bounce Energy finished 3rd, trailing Green Mountain by just 2 points.
The other big story is that once again, consumer satisfaction in Texas electricity continued to rise for the 3rd straight year, from 706 in 2014 to 715 in 2015. This trend continues to show record satisfaction with the deregulated electricity system among the people polled.
Other important takeaways are the increased focus, both by customers as well as by the J.D. Power survey, in communication and customer service in overall satisfaction:
Providing an outstanding customer experience can generate high levels of advocacy and retention. The study finds that 57 percent of highly satisfied retail customers (overall satisfaction scores of 900 or higher) say they “definitely will” renew their contract, and 62 percent say they “definitely will” recommend their retail electric provider. In contrast, only 21 percent of dissatisfied customers (scores of 550 or less) say they “definitely will” renew and only 3 percent say they “definitely will” recommend.
So it looks like after being deregulated for nearly 15 years, retail electricity providers are finally learning the importance of establishing real lines of communication with their customers, and are working to continually improve their processes. This is great news for Texas electricity customers.
The J.D. Power Residential Customer Satisfaction survey is part of how the formula for how Texas Electricity Ratings determines our own ranking system. With these changes, we will once again update our own rankings, which also include our latest updates on pricing, customer reviews, and other items. You’ll see a new update from us shortly, and when you do, we’ll post about it here. But once again, congratulations to Champion Energy Services!