Residential Customer Water And Wastewater Sales Analyses And Profiles

Studying customer behavior has become an essential financial management and research component for most commercial enterprises. Should customer sales analyses play a role in shaping or preparing for water utility management decisions, such as changing pricing or providing a new customer program? In this paper, we investigate how individual customer sales information can be collected and analyzed, using billing data, in a way that supports water services management decisions. We conduct customer sales analyses for three large utilities in North Carolina, and by tracking each customer’s history and billing experience, we examine trends and relationships related to usage patterns and fluctuations, irrigation and capacity use, timeliness of payment and cutoff patterns, and geographic variation within communities. The variation in the results for each of the utility studied reinforces the necessity of customizing pricing and policy to local conditions. Customer level analysis also permits utilities to carry out targeted marketing so that they communicate messages directly to customers most likely to respond or need the message.

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Linked below is a collection of various resources that address similar issues of residential water and wastewater sales.

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