Utilities provide critical and necessary services to their communities, but that does not mean consumers always look on utilities fondly. High prices, disruptions in service and poor communication with its customers all can impact how a utility is viewed by its community. Citizens Energy Group fully understands this, and though it is ranked highest for customer satisfaction in the Midwest, the group is focused on continuing to improve its customer service in the belief that this is the best way to operate.

“Like most utilities, we are a monopoly, so there are two ways to approach our customers,” explains Mike Strohl, senior vice president of customer relations. “It’s either that we’re the only game in town and you’ll get what we give. Or, we’re the only game in town, so we have a moral responsibility to serve you well. We believe in doing business the second way.”

Based in Indianapolis, Citizens Energy Group is a nonprofit public charitable trust engaged in five different businesses that work together to provide residential and commercial customers throughout the central Indiana region with natural gas, water, wastewater, steam and chilled water services. One of its divisions also is involved with oil production. Striving to serve its customers with “unparalleled excellence and integrity,” the group’s mission involves providing safe and reliable services, protecting the environment, maintaining the lowest-possible rates, building its businesses and adding value to create “the greatest long-term benefits for its customers and communities.”

Last year, Citizens underwent a major change to enhance its services and benefit its customers when the city of Indianapolis transferred the community’s water and wastewater utilities to Citizens. The group estimates this move will result in as much as $60 million in annual savings and will deliver a 25 percent reduction in projected water and wastewater rate increases by 2025. With the funds from the utility transfer, the city is making infrastructure improvements in parks; repairing bridges, streets and sidewalks; and demolishing unsalvageable abandoned homes.

“We acquired the Indianapolis Water Co., which was owned by the city and operated by an outsourced contractor,” Strohl says. “As a local gas utility, we were very interested in this opportunity because there are a lot of redundancies in service areas and many ways in which we could make the entire operation more efficient.

“It was a major change for us, however,” he adds. “We went from having $1 billion in assets to $3 billion overnight, and we doubled our workforce.”

Even while undergoing such a major organizational change, Citizens had no intention of allowing its customer service to falter. The group worked hard to maintain open communication with customers, quickly respond to field requests and further its corporate citizenship efforts. As a result, customers rated Citizens as the best gas utility in the Midwest for service – for the second year in a row and third time overall – according to a survey by J.D. Power & Associates.

“We are very proud of this ranking, especially as it came after the last year of acquiring an organization that was significantly larger than ourselves,” Strohl says. “Customer satisfaction is our core value and we drive that through all levels of our business. We approach all of our work by being friendly, fast and flexible, and that is because it’s in the best interest of our customers.”

Streamlined Services

Citizens’ core value of customer satisfaction drove one of the group’s major recent initiatives – the implementation of its “one bill, one payment, one call and one website” program. Launched just a year after the group’s acquisition of the city’s water and wastewater services, this program strives to make it easier for customers to do business with Citizens.

According to Strohl, this program made many enhancements to the level of service Citizens provides, such as:

• Most residential customers now receive one bill with separate charges for gas, water and sewer services. Citizens estimates this will reduce processing and postage costs, saving about $1 million annually, which the group will pass onto its customers.
• Instead of making separate payments for gas, water and sewer services, most residents of Marion County, Ind., only have to manage one payment for these services.
• When customers need assistance with an issue related to their gas, water or sewer bill, they call one number. The same number will connect them with representatives to address any of those services.
• Rather than visiting multiple websites for utility questions or concerns, customers can get all the information they need from CitizensEnergyGroup.com.

“We acquired the water and wastewater assets from the city, but they came with an antiquated billing system,” Strohl explains. “We had to convert it to something much more customer-friendly, so after 13 months and a $5 million investment, we integrated the water and wastewater billing with our gas billing. We worked hard to respond as quickly as we could to improve these aspects of our operations. In the end, it’s all about customer satisfaction.”

Citizens has other initiatives underway, including the implementation of monthly meter reading – weather permitting – in an effort to eliminate estimated bills, which many customers have said they dislike.

“We’ve also created a new group – Shared Field Services – so customers are dealing with one face in the field,” explains Jeff Harrison, vice president of capital programs and engineering. “The same person will go out on service calls to take care of a customers water, wastewater and gas issues. We took on so many new people with the acquisition, and so we created this program to keep our service response levels high.”

Cleaning Up

Customer service initiatives are a major part of Citizens’ plan to maintain a high level of customer satisfaction, but the group also has several major capital projects underway and in the planning stages to ensure its core services also demonstrate excellence and regard for area residents.

“Historically, we were spending about $35 million each year on its capital program,” Harrison says. “For fiscal 2013, however, we have $330 in capital projects. A big component of that is the Deep Rock Tunnel project.”

The $179.3 million Deep Rock Tunnel Connector project, in fact, is the first phase of the Indianapolis Tunnel Storage System, which is the largest public works project in the city’s history. According to Mark Jacob, director of special projects, this project is part of Citizens’ federally mandated consent decree to curb the overflow of raw sewage into Indianapolis’ waterways. Currently, as little as a quarter inch of rain can cause combined sewers to reach their capacity and then overflow into the area’s rivers and streams. This Deep Rock Tunnel Connector project has been designed to address three of the city’s combined sewer overflow (CSO) locations.

From the Deep Rock Tunnel Connector project, additional storage tunnels will be extended along White River, Fall Creek, Pleasant Run and Lower Pogues Run to create a collective, underground storage system for sewage. Instead of flowing into local waterways, sewage captured at the CSOs will be transported to the wastewater treatment plant. The tunnel will have the capacity to store most of the raw sewage during large storm events.

“Because of the city’s combined stormwater and wastewater pipes, Indianapolis has problems with these CSOs,” Jacob explains. “There are more than 700 cities in the United States with this same problem. In Indianapolis, EPA negotiated a consent decree with Indianapolis to complete this program by 2025.

“Our project will involve 25 miles of tunnels, which will be 18 feet across and 200 feet deep,” he continues. “Currently, there is about 5 billion gallons of overflow into the streams each year and this is a significant environmental impact to those streams.”

The Deep Rock Tunnel project began in December 2011 and the work is scheduled to be completed in 2017. When this project is finished, Citizens will be able to capture between 95 and 97 percent of all the overflow sewage currently going to the streams. Additionally, due to a recent amendment that was negotiated with U.S. EPA, the consent decree will capture and additional 3.5 billion gallons of raw sewage through 2025 that would have otherwise gone to the streams.

That modification allowed the consent decree cost to realize more than $700 million in savings while improving the management of flows between the two wastewater treatment plants. It also minimizes inconveniences to local residents during construction. This updated plan will improve the energy efficiency of Citizens’ operations, resulting in long-term reduced environmental impacts, and limit utility disruptions, which will yield even further savings.

“We are a year ahead of our schedule for the construction program, which we are proud of,” Jacob notes. “When this is completed, not only will it have extensive improved environmental benefits, but it will result in lower rates for our customers and increased savings for the overall organization.”

The first part of the project is occurring on the far south side of Indianapolis, and overall, the project involves the construction of five pieces of the tunnel, construction of a new pump station and expansion of the city’s two wastewater treatment plants. Jacob explains that the capacities of the two treatment plants will be doubled and their capabilities will be enhanced.

Dedicated to Green

The Indianapolis Storage Tunnel System will benefit the environment in a major way when it is completed, but that is not the only project in which Citizens is reducing its impact on the city’s resources. Later this year, Citizens plans to begin its work to convert its steam plant’s boilers to use clean-burning natural gas instead of coal. This project, which will conclude in 2014, will improve the environment, reduce environmental compliance costs and lower the plant’s operating costs so the utility’s steam rates will be more competitive.

“Our Perry K steam plant sells steam to downtown Indianapolis businesses to heat the buildings,” Strohl explains. “We will be converting the boilers to natural gas from coal, which will have major environmental and cost benefits. We received regulatory approval, so we will be moving forward soon.”

Citizens invested about $12 million at Perry K to comply with EPA’s Boiler MACT I air emissions standards in 2006, and it was tasked with implementing EPA’s Boiler MACT II air emissions standards by 2014. The utility determined it could lower future capital costs by approximately $15 million by modifying the Perry K boilers to burn natural gas instead of coal. Citizens estimates this also will reduce annual operating costs by about $5 million compared to operating modified coal boilers that would meet the new clean air standards.

“All of our business units are focused on environmental sustainability and increasing energy efficiency,” Harrison stresses. “We also are doing a lot to push the conservation message out to our customers. This year we had a drought, which a number of customers experienced for the first time and learned to live with less water. It will be interesting to see if customers’ conservation efforts continue.”

Strohl notes that some cities are trying to achieve “hard numbers on green infrastructure,” but Citizens is working with Indianapolis to implement several green initiatives. A couple of years ago, for example, the utility began to separate the stormwater and wastewater in some areas of the city’s combined sewer system. Instead of the stormwater draining back to the wastewater treatment plants, some of it was diverted to a bio garden.

“The stormwater goes to the bio garden with trees and different types of vegetation, and when that ran off into local streams, it was much better than what’s happening with the CSO,” he says. “Now we have more dedicated green areas that look better, are healthy and are improving the cleanliness of the streams. We’re very focused on implementing programs like this that are better for the environment, the neighborhoods and streams, and they save money.”

Synergistic Teamwork

Citizens’ ability to maintain high levels of customer satisfaction while implementing new programs and undertaking major capital projects is the result of teamwork. Jacob stresses that the utility’s approach to teamwork also is a key way in which it saves money.

“Teamwork has been very important as we’ve been integrating the water and wastewater operations,” he says. “One example is in our projects – instead of building separate gas, water and sewer projects, we’ve been commingling our capital plan to do one restoration in an area at a time. This has resulted in huge cost savings and has reduced the impact we have on the area’s residents and businesses.”

Harrison says teamwork drives all projects – not just on the construction, but the importance of teamwork and coordination between the construction teams and the utility’s operations group.

“The capital construction team has to work closely with the operations group to determine appropriate project timing, ensure customers’ needs are met and to keep the public informed,” he says. “A lot of coordination and information dissemination takes place, and a lot more coordination and timing of all of the different aspects of each project. The summer, for example, is the peak season for water use, so we try not to schedule a lot of work during that time so it won’t adversely impact our customers.”

Strohl adds that teamwork is simply a major aspect of Citizens’ overall culture of customer satisfaction.

“Our focus on customer satisfaction pays great dividends, and teamwork is a key part of that,” he says. “We work cross-functionally so everyone involved has visibility into our major projects. Our teamwork follows a synergistic model – we achieve our goals at one time versus everyone working sideways. We always are focused on quality, and hope that shows in everything we do.” m