The Survey Says …
DSO recently completed a membership survey of 611 randomly selected members. We do the membership survey on a regular (if not annual) basis to determine member interest in various programs, to gauge member satisfaction with DSO, and to provide you with a vehicle to let us know about any issues you are having with your service.
Your feedback is important, as it drives some of the decisions that the board of directors makes. For example, the low number of members driving or thinking of purchasing an electric vehicle (EV) has delayed DSO’s development of an EV rate. We do anticipate that we will be offering such a rate, but we will wait until more members are driving EVs.
Overall, we are pleased to know that nearly 90% of the members surveyed are happy with their service from DSO. This satisfaction rating is better than customers rate the average municipal utility, investor-owned utility, or fellow electric cooperative utility. Here are some additional survey results:
- Members are most satisfied with reliability and response times to outages and issues.
- Members are least satisfied with electric rates.
- Members rate their interactions with DSO employees very high.
- While nearly 30% see themselves as member-owners, about 2/3 see themselves only as customers.
- Members place high value on receiving capital credits and having multiple rate options.
- Members place low value on attending annual meetings and running for the board of directors.
- Readership of Kansas Country Living remains high at nearly 90%.
- About half the membership is aware there is a time-of-use rate available for residents where DSO pays the member to shut off power from 3-6 PM on peak days in July and August and the member does not have to pay Red Zone rates during the summer.
- As previously mentioned, there is low interest in EVs.
- Installing solar panels is becoming more popular for residents.
- The average age of the survey respondent was 59 years old.
- The average length of DSO service of the survey respondent was 15 years.
Finally, there were some member comments about various issues in the survey. We are doing our best to research the issues and may be reaching out to you regarding the matter you cited.