It was Benjamin Franklin who said, “I haven’t failed, but I’ve found 10,000 ways that don’t work.”

To avoid trying 10,000 ways that don’t work, your Board of Trustees meets periodically to review past accomplishments and plan for the future.  Prior to each planning session, the Cooperative membership is surveyed by an independent survey firm in order to determine what areas of our operation need improvement.  In the latter part of 2004, SouthEastern members returned a total of 380 surveys, providing a 95% confidence level in the results.

The survey revealed that over 98% of the Cooperative’s members have a positive view of SouthEastern with just slightly less than 98% of them indicating they were satisfied with the overall level of service provided by SouthEastern.

When asked about the reliability of service received from their Cooperative, 43% of the respondents felt their service had improved over the past few years and 54% felt it had stayed the same and although these are very good numbers, it is an area we will strive to improve on.

Of the 59% of the membership that tried to phone their Cooperative in the past year, 88% reported they had no difficulty in contacting someone to help them.  Those who said they had difficulty in contacting the Cooperative, listed the failure of the Cooperative to return their phone call as the most common complaint, a situation which should improve significantly once our Customer Service Representative work stations are installed in the spring of 2005 and phone calls are answered live during regular business hours.

The majority of members gave positive ratings to the employees they had contact with, with 98% describing our employees as Courteous or Extremely Courteous.

In seven specific areas including:  (1) new service installation, (2) handling outage calls, (3) restoring power, (4) service reliability, (5) dealing with billing questions, (6) repairing wires/trimming trees and (7) marketing, our members gave us very strong marks with 8 out of 10 ranking all the areas either as Excellent or Good.

When asked if electricity is more expensive, about in line, or more economical than what you are paying for other goods and services, including other energy sources, some 66% of those surveyed indicated it was “in line”.  Of the 34% who didn’t think the cost of electricity was “in line”, 17% thought it was more expensive and 17% thought it was more economical than other goods, services and energy they were presently purchasing.

Most members (90%) get their information about SouthEastern from this and other publications provided by the Cooperative and some 79% of the members reported that they read this publication frequently.

The 2004 survey incorporated a series of ACSI (American Customer Satisfaction Index) questions which allowed SouthEastern to be ranked with other electric cooperatives and investor-owned utilities across the country.  Overall the Touchstone Energy Cooperatives across the country scored very well with a rating of 81, while the top investor-owned utilities dropped, with PPL falling to a score of 80 and the Southern Company dropping to 79.  The electric industry average remained unchanged from last year’s score of 72.

The overall score for the seventeen Illinois electric cooperatives participating in the ACSI survey is 77, but SouthEastern’s score is 81 which is among the highest in the State.

See you next month and as always, "We’ll keep the lights on for you."