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Pacific Palisades Fires: Correcting Misinformation about LADWP’s Water System

STATEMENT BY LADWP GENERAL MANAGER MARCIE EDWARDS REGARDING LAWSUIT FILED BY LA CITY ATTORNEY MIKE FEUER AGAINST PRICEWATERHOUSE COOPERS REGARDING LADWP CUSTOMER CARE AND BILLING SYSTEM

STATEMENT BY LADWP GENERAL MANAGER MARCIE EDWARDS REGARDING LAWSUIT FILED BY LA CITY ATTORNEY MIKE FEUER AGAINST PRICEWATERHOUSE COOPERS REGARDING LADWP CUSTOMER CARE AND BILLING SYSTEM
I would like to thank City Attorney Mike Feuer for taking strong action today to address the problems too many of our customers experienced when we launched our new customer care and billing system 18 months ago. 

During our billing system rollout, the new system estimated far too many bills, causing confusion and frustration for too many of our customers and for our own customer service representatives who were trying to help them.

I want to assure our customers that since the rollout, we have routinely corrected incorrectly estimated bills found not to be accurate by cancelling and rebilling those customers according to actual meter data. Still, the problems we experienced were significant, and we understand the anger and frustration experienced by those who were affected. 

We have been very forthright about the problems with our new customer billing system and we have taken significant steps to fix them.  We have made tremendous progress and appreciate the action by the City Attorney today.  This progress includes:

  1. Hiring over 200 customer service representatives and meter readers to reduce call hold times and better serve our customers;
  2. Completing 100% of meter read routes daily and achieving 95% or higher meter read performance, leaving only inaccessible meters;
  3. Decreasing average call wait times from over 35 minutes to under 5 minutes;
  4. Decreasing estimated bills from over 20% to 5%;
  5. Improving timely billing from 95% to over 98.5% – exceeding utility industry standards;
  6. Offering a Late Payment Forgiveness Program to all customers;
  7. Offering online, self-service payment arrangement/plan options for our customers;
  8. Improving our responsiveness to email customers.

We are committed to continuing this improvement and to offering better service to our customers as we work to offer budget billing/level pay plans, more convenient payment options and lower call hold times, among other ongoing initiatives.

We know that a very small percentage of our customers continue to have problems with bills they are receiving.  Most of these cases involve bills that have been corrected over multiple billing periods, and are clearly labeled as such on the bill.  We are proactively reaching out to these customers to explain the corrected charges and answer any questions they may have.  We also encourage any customer who has a question about their bill to contact us at 800-DIAL-DWP (800-342-5397).  Any customer who has tried to have their billing problems addressed and are still not satisfied are encouraged to contact me directly online at www.TellMeDWP.com.”

More information about our billing system, its status and the steps we have taken to improve can be found online at www.ladwp.com/BillingInfo.

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