The City of Fresno’s Department of Public Utilities (DPU) regularly provides water, wastewater, and solid waste services to over 500,000 residential and commercial customers. However, when planning the next marketing campaign, leadership recognized a discrepancy between their departmental stance on quality, service, and value and the public’s perception of receiving those services. Additionally, there was a tax incentive that would benefit their department by having a more positive brand image.
The DPU team decided to utilize MMAPS to understand their customer’s wants and needs thoroughly before diving into their next marketing campaigns. As a result, they could specifically focus on improving certain areas and bring more value to their services to the benefit of their customers.
Our Calculated Approach
Getting relevant feedback is as easy as trusting MMAPS survey expertise and sending an email to your customer base. To obtain feedback on each of the four divisions under DPU, our team crafted a survey of 26 questions that was thorough yet simple enough to complete in five minutes or less, so we didn’t lose interest.
The survey was emailed to DPU customers and posted on social media to yield additional interest. As a result, our team received 352 qualified surveys with no more than a 5% margin of error in just 22 days. The feedback ranged from customers thanking staff for the services to suggesting friendlier customer support and improving the consistency of services.
The DPU leadership decided to launch a series of campaigns that addressed these perceptions. First, they planned to highlight what employees do in places like wastewater treatment plants. Second, with the top two perceptions involving staff members, DPU launched an awareness campaign to promote their employees working hard behind the scenes.
Qualified Surveys
Received
Clicks
Million Impressions
The impact of their general awareness campaign alone was substantial. In the first month of paid media, the campaign generated 4.8 million impressions and 12,760 clicks while highlighting six essential workers making a difference in their community every day.
Overall, the objective of this customer perception survey was to reconnect DPU with its customers. However, after getting survey feedback, it turned out that a connection actually needed to be made between the DPU employees “Providing Life’s Essential Services” and the customers benefitting from those services. In the end, that goal was a huge success based on the paid media campaign. That’s a testament to the power of knowledge obtained from a customer perception survey customized and delivered by our MMAPS team!