Investigating effectiveness of water supply on civil complaints and customer satisfaction

Abstract

Water supply is a basic factor for the lives of the people and the development of the national economy. Therefore, management of water supply plays a key role for customer satisfaction. In the case of Korea, local governments manage water facilities to supply tap water to the people. So local governments are the local water supply companies that manage each administrative district. However, as local governments are responsible for supplying tap water, the level of tap water service varies depending on the financial independence of individual local governments, the availability of water supply professionals, and low fees. The main business objectives of local water supply companies are safe water supply and water quality management. However, other services, such as staff attitude and efforts to meet diverse customer needs, are lacking. K-water conducts an annual customer satisfaction survey to measure customer satisfaction with local water supplies. However, it is difficult to grasp the ever-changing needs of customers with only annual customer satisfaction surveys. This study will examine whether various complaints raised by local water supply customers (such as service improvement, inconvenience resolution, and policy proposals) can be used to improve the quality of service in the overall local water supply business. In this study, focuse on the water supply business in Nonsan, 1) Whether an increase or decrease in the number of customer complaints of a particular type has a positive or negative effect on customer satisfaction, 2) Whether the long or short time taken to process complaints has a positive or negative effect on customer satisfaction, 3) Whether the difference in the water usage environment, such as the difference in water usage by Eup, Myeon, and Dong in the city, affects customer satisfaction, By studying this, we would like to investigate the effect of customer complaints on customer satisfaction. In order to conduct this study, the civil complaint data submitted by customers of the Nonsan Regional Water Center of the K-water for five years from 2014 to 2018 were intensively analyzed. The results of verifying the above three hypotheses are as follows. 1) The increase or decrease in the number of specific civil complaints, such as water quality and water supply facilities, has a positive correlation with customer satisfaction. On the contrary, customer satisfaction has a negative correlation with specific civil complaint items such as reissue of bills and requesting changes in customer information. 2) As a result of analyzing the effect of the time taken to process complaints on customer satisfaction, In 2018, when customer satisfaction fell sharply, it was confirmed that the number of complaints processed within one minute decreased, and the number of complaints processed by more than 20 minutes increased. 3) As a result of analyzing the effect of the difference in water usage environment on customer satisfaction by eup, myeon, and dong, there is no significant difference between villages that use a lot of water and villages that use less water. Therefore, it was confirmed that regional characteristics did not significantly affect customer satisfaction. Unlike the private sector, public services can be monopolized. Therefore, customer satisfaction in the public service sector seemed unimportant. However, customers'' needs for public services become diversified. The role of customer satisfaction should be addressed importantly in the public service sector. In the past, sufficient water supply was the most important thing in tap water policy. However, there is a growing demand from customers for improving the quality of tap water services. It is necessary to immediately respond to customer complaints related to tap water by creating a system that can proactively respond to customer demands. It is necessary to increase customer satisfaction by identifying which items customers are most sensitive to among various customer complaints (charges, water supply, water quality, etc.), and to create a tap water management system that can quickly address customers'' needs.