Kansas City water department turns tide toward improving service

Four years ago, the reputation of Kansas City’s Water Services Department with many in the public was, shall we say, in the toilet.

It was known for a revolving door of directors and listless management, lousy customer service, poor handling of billing, and constantly leaking water mains that took too long to fix.

“It was adrift,” acknowledges City Manager Troy Schulte, who knew he had to do something about the beleaguered department with 160,000 household and business customers.

Schulte said that making over the department was crucial because water and sewer service was the one basic service that touches every Kansas City resident — and rates were skyrocketing.

Schulte and department officials agree that Water Services still has a long way to go, but reforms over the last few years — including a just-completed $12.3 million call center and billing overhaul at the department’s headquarters at 4800 E. 63rd St. — have led to a significant transformation. It’s reflected in improved customer satisfaction scores.

Even some fierce critics haven taken notice and say the agency has turned the corner.

“Things are definitely improved,” said Greg Patterson, a Kansas City resident and commercial property owner who had complained about five years ago that Water Services was the most dysfunctional utility in the region.

Now, questions about water accounts are answered promptly, they have a good system for helping people monitor usage, and the department has call takers who speak Spanish, Patterson noted.

“I don’t have to go down there and camp out on 63rd Street to get something done,” he said.

The swift response to leaky pipes even prompted a rare, complimentary letter to the editor in September from Ed and Barbara Lusk.

They described a major break in front of their home at 5:30 p.m., after regular business hours, that was repaired that same night. Their driveway was resurfaced within 10 days.

“We were so amazed at how fast everyone responded and did such a good job,” they wrote.

Surveys show satisfaction with the department’s customer service has increased from 47 percent in 2013 to 52 percent this year, and dissatisfaction has dropped from 21 percent to 16 percent. (The rest of respondents either were neutral or didn’t know).

Satisfaction with the overall water and sewer utility rose to 60 percent in 2014-2015, up from 51 percent in 2011-2012.

Unfinished business

Both Schulte and Water Services Director Terry Leeds, appointed to that post Jan. 1, 2012, agree more progress is needed. There is a huge backlog of unfinished field work, and the system suffers twice as many main breaks as a good one should.

Schulte and Leeds also realize angst is mounting over ever-increasing customer charges, now that the average monthly residential bill totals about $90 for water and sewer service, up from $56 four years ago. With planned annual increases, that average monthly bill is projected to jump to $139 by 2020.

Leeds notes that at least the department is now acting like a professional utility. Operating under the assumption that what gets measured gets solved, the department measures everything from how long it takes to address a caller’s complaint to how long it takes to restore grass around a broken pipe.

“The story to me is that now we are tracking data to know how we are doing, whether that’s good, bad or indifferent,” he said.

That wasn’t always the case. Things were so bad that in early 2012, Schulte brought in Bill Downey, a retired former executive at Kansas City Power & Light Co., as a consultant to offer perspective from a veteran of the utilities industry.

Downey recommended a host of management changes, including the removal of some longtime bureaucrats, which occurred. He also said the city couldn’t continue with its antiquated billing system and a call center in which up to 30 percent of callers, several hundred a day, simply gave up because it took so long for someone to answer the phone.

Downey recommended the city hire Chicago-based West Monroe Partners with a $12 million, two-year contract to overhaul the call center and billing software. The no-bid contract, just completed, was controversial at the time. Now officials say it provided outside business expertise and an upgraded billing system that the department couldn’t have duplicated in-house.

Calls now are answered within 30 seconds 80 percent of the time, although on a recent day the center met that goal only 60 percent of the time. The rate at which callers give up and hang up has dropped from 30 percent to below 5 percent.

Call takers get six weeks of training now, much more than before, and give consistent and standardized answers to billing questions, which managers acknowledge often didn’t happen in the past.

On a recent Thursday, Muriel Gordon helped a customer try to identify why his bill seemed too high — a frequent issue. She looked at a chart showing the customer’s daily water use (as customers can also do online), told him it looked abnormally high on four particular days and sent him some free dye tablets to test for a toilet leak.

High bills and worries about errors prompt frequent questions, Gordon said. The department adjusts bills if someone has a burst pipe or other unusual circumstance and can set up payment plans for people struggling to pay mounting water bills. Nearly 3,500 customers have payment arrangements.

Another recent improvement is that the department can schedule meter field crews to show up at a home within a four-hour window, instead of eight hours as before.

Downey’s consulting contract with the city ended Dec. 31, but he kept in contact and said in a telephone interview last week that he was pleased with management’s transformation and the West Monroe outcomes.

“It’s gone very smoothly,” he said.

“There were plenty of things that could have gone wrong,” said Downey, who also oversaw big changes at KCP&L.

Leeds, too, said he was relieved that Kansas City had not suffered the horrible billing mistakes and bureaucratic headaches that some water systems have recently endured, such as those in Austin, Texas, and Baltimore.

Customers see progress

Some Kansas City customers say they have noticed improvements, although they still want more.

Joseph Jackson, the president of the Kansas City Neighborhood Advisory Council, which addresses residents’ concerns, says the water department still has long waits for customers who pay their bills in person. And owners of vacant properties complain about paying basic service charges even when there’s no water.

Department officials said telephone and online pay arrangements often alleviate the need for customers to pay their bills in person, but they are unapologetic about monthly service charges, saying it costs the department to have water ready when those vacant houses become occupied again.

Another major initiative has been to speed the repair of water main breaks and restore service, which took as long as six months in 2011. That average time dropped to less than a month this year.

Leeds said breaks dropped from nearly 1,900 in 2013 to 766 this year, thanks in part to an aggressive data tracking and maintenance program but also because drought conditions a few years ago have abated.

The department still suffers about 60 to 70 main breaks per 100 miles, which Leeds said is more than twice as many as a good system. Spending to install new mains should help.

“We do now have a proactive water main replacement program,” Leeds said, adding that a few more years without drought should show sustainable benefits.

“I would say in five to six years we should see a light at the end of the tunnel,” Leeds said.

This story was originally published November 9, 2015 at 5:32 PM with the headline "Kansas City water department turns tide toward improving service."