J.D. Power 2025: What the Lowest Satisfaction Score Ever Means for Your Contact Center

The number that should be on every utility operations leader's desk right now is 499. That's the residential customer satisfaction score recorded by J.D. Power in its 2025 Electric Utility Residential Customer Satisfaction Study — the lowest score in the study's history.

It represents a sector in trouble. Bills are up 34% since 2020, averaging $189 per month. Grid reliability is declining. Regulatory scrutiny is increasing. And customers — residential and commercial alike — are running out of patience.

But the 499 figure doesn't tell the whole story. What's more instructive is the 212-point gap between the best and worst performing utilities in the same study. That gap doesn't come from different infrastructure or different grids. It comes almost entirely from how utilities communicate with their customers.

Where trust is actually built

Only 19% of customers completely trust their energy provider, according to the 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer. What builds trust? The data is consistent across multiple studies. Proactive communication during outages is the single highest-impact lever. Customers who receive five or more contact points during a power outage score 210 points higher on satisfaction than those who receive none.

A helpful bill explanation delivers a 161-point CSAT increase. A customer who understands why their bill has increased — even if they're unhappy about it — is dramatically less likely to file a complaint, contact a regulator or switch providers.

The contact center is the trust machine

For most utilities, the contact center is the primary — often the only — direct interaction a customer has with the company outside of their monthly bill. It is where trust is built or destroyed in real time.

A customer who calls during an outage and reaches a knowledgeable agent who can tell them what happened, when it will be fixed and what the utility is doing about it leaves that call with higher trust than before the outage. A customer who waits on hold for eight minutes and speaks to an agent reading from a generic script leaves with lower trust than before they called.

What this means for mid-market utilities

Large utilities can absorb poor satisfaction scores through sheer market position. Mid-market providers operating in competitive or deregulated markets cannot. A 20% annual churn rate among low-trust providers is a business model problem, not just a customer experience problem.

The organizations gaining ground in J.D. Power rankings treat outage communication as a proactive, structured program. They have surge-ready contact center capacity. They train agents on tariffs, billing systems and empathy-led communication. And they measure satisfaction as a business metric, not just an operational one.