CMP, Versant rank among the country's worst utilities for customer satisfaction

File photo In a study by J.D. Power, Central Maine Power Co. ranked last for customer satisfaction among 145 electric utilities.

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By William Hall

Both Central Maine Power Co. and Versant Power, which together provide electricity for nearly the entire state, received two of the worst grades in the country from a new study of utility customer satisfaction.

CMP ranked dead last among the largest 145 U.S. electric utilities, with a satisfaction rating of 647 on a 1,000-point scale, in the study by market research firm J.D. Power.

Versant, with a satisfaction rating of 679, tied for the country’s fourth-worst with San Francisco-based Pacific Gas and Electric Co. (NYSE: PCG).

J.D. Power, which is widely known for its satisfaction studies, based the ratings on interview responses from 100,999 residential utility customers, representing 101 million U.S. households. The interviews were conducted between January and November.

The overall rating for the electric utilities studied was 748, J.D. Power said in its study findings.

CMP ranked last among large Eastern utilities, while Versant ranked last in its category of mid-size ones. The top scorer among the large contenders was Pennsylvania-based PPL Electric Utilities, with a rating of 779. Another company from that state, Penn Power, topped the mid-size group, coming in at 768.

Across all regions and categories, two mid-size utilities topped the country, both scoring 824: EPB, in the South region, and Clark Public Utilities, in the West.

While the satisfaction scores enable comparisons among the 145 electricity providers, there are more than 3,000 such utilities nationwide.

In a J.D. Power satisfaction study conducted last year among U.S. business customers, CMP received the lowest score of 88 electric utilities This year, CMP and some other utilities were not included in that study because of insufficient response sample size.

Central Maine Power Co., a subsidiary of Connecticut-based Avangrid Inc. (NYSE: AGR), serves 646,000 electricity customers in an 11,000-square-mile area in central and southern Maine.

Versant Power serves 159,000 customers in northern and eastern Maine. The company, formerly Emera Maine, is owned by Enmax Corp., based in Calgary, Alberta.