Report on Customer Service Performance Measures in UK Network Industries: Squeezing Hard to Improve Quality

Abstract

Literature on performance measurement systems reached great heights in the late-1980s, and challenges of the traditional financial performance indicators being inadequate for measuring what is most representative of organisation-wide operations in the 1990s. This paper provides a descriptive consideration on the customer service aspect of performance measures, as imposed by the economic regulators of water and sewerage services, electricity (supply, distribution and transmission), gas (supply and transmission) and telecommunications. This paper is also offers a detailed description of the evolution and performance of the companies within these network industries, indicating any emerging trends behind the patterns that explain the operational effectiveness and implications to which the data draw our attention. The observations on the published performance measurement data indicate a general trend of improvement over time in the performance of all companies in all the industries. The greatest rate of improvement is most obvious in the earlier years of the Standards being established, nearer to the time o