Service Quality in Power Sector

Abstract

Service quality is an important issue in the electricity distribution and retail sectors. Customers are highly sensitive to all aspects of service quality and value the speed and accuracy with which their requests are handled, the reliability of the electricity supply, and the characteristics of the supply voltage.
Quality regulation entails complications and subtleties. First of all, there is the multi-dimensional nature of service quality. Furthermore, the ideal level of quality depends on consumer preferences, and these preferences can vary widely among customers. In addition, measuring quality can be difficult, consumer behavior can affect the quality of the network, and so forth. As a result, there is no simple policy indication for service quality regulation: different means are normally used to induce regulated companies to deliver the desired levels of service quality on different quality dimensions.
In this project firstly some popular methods for measuring service quality have been analyzed briefly. A consumer survey was then done to demonstrate the importance of service quality in power sector and its use. A questionnaire containing six questions which was most relevant to the consumers dealt with in the survey was distributed to the respondents. The weight for each index in the questionnaire was determined using entropy method. Then the overall Customer Satisfaction Index (CSI) was determined using the weights previously calculated and the data obtained from the consumer survey and the results were plotted in bar charts. The results obtained demonstrated the importance of the service quality in power sector and also gave useful insight into consumer preferences and the changes required to deliver the quality of service expected by the consumers.