Mayor Takes Action on City Light Billing Complaints
April 15, 2002

Mayor Greg Nickels today took aggressive steps to promote confidence in Seattle City Light's billing system and maintain a high level of customer service.

Each year, the utility mails out two million bills. Recently, about 80 bills were too high in a mailing of about 22,000. Customers reported poor treatment when they called to question the bills. Mayor Nickels found these developments unacceptable.

A review by city officials showed the computerized billing system was not to blame for the erroneous bills - the problems were attributed to human errors in data collection and processing.

"I have directed City Light to improve how it collects and handles data used to calculate bills," Nickels said. "I want to fix any remaining problems, insure they do not happen again and strengthen our resolve to treat people fairly and with respect. Complaints of high bills will be resolved within two weeks. If we can't sort out what happened, we'll do it the Nordstrom way: we will resolve problems in the customer's favor."

In response to the mayor, City Light Superintendent Gary Zarker said the utility will take four specific steps to address billing problems:

• There will be more aggressive auditing of all data entered into the billing system.
• Staff will be added to manually check more bills in a more thorough manner.
• Complaints of high bills will be resolved within two weeks. Customers with a question about their bill should call 684-3000. Electricity will never be shut off while customers are working with the utility.
• IBM will do a quality assurance audit of the City Light billing system.

Zarker said he will make sure that every City Light employee understands the high bar for quality customer service expected of City employees.

"We are confident that we are catching and correcting the vast majority of mistakes before they become problems for our customers," Zarker said. "I want our customers to know that our goal is to give them an accurate bill every time. If we make a mistake, we will get to the bottom of it quickly and resolve it in a manner the customer finds fair."

"City light has a great history as the public's utility," the mayor said "From the beginning the idea was serving the public, not pursuing profit. Over the past few years, City Light's gone through some tough times - the energy crisis drove up rates on the entire West Coast. I don't like paying the higher rates either, but we are working our way out of that dilemma.

"The billing problem is something else. For every single customer, we should strive to do our best -- when we fall short, we don't make excuses; we make it right."