---
title: Improving Utility Resilience
description: New Cogent Syndicated report reveals how utility companies can exceed customer expectations in an era of increasing climate-driven natural disasters.
image: https://landing.escalent.co/hubfs/Energy/Fact%20Sheets/Utility%20Resilience%20pg1_iStock-1402046399.jpg
---

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# Improving Utility Resilience

 Meet customer expectations and enhance reliability perceptions in an era of increasing climate-driven natural disasters and threats of grid attacks

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### Request More Information

Utilities are facing an increasing number of natural disasters, including hurricanes, wildfires, winter storms and heat waves, that regularly threaten service. Additionally, a well-publicized outbreak of substation attacks in 2022 and cyberattacks in other industries have some customers concerned about grid safety. Companies have been investing in grid-hardening efforts to improve resilience, but in some areas, those efforts can’t be completed quickly enough to outpace weather events and domestic terror threats.

Utilities must improve perceived and actual reliability to increase brand trust. This report taps into Cogent Syndicated’s wealth of consumer data to uncover customers’ expectations of their utility before, during, and after a significant outage event. In addition, the report looks into the most effective ways to communicate about infrastructure hardening and smart grid investments to improve customer perceptions of utility reliability.

## Value

**The report will enable subscribers to:**

**Benchmark Expectations**  
Identify customer expectations before, during and after a significant outage

**Determine Influence**  
Understand how actual reliability and utility communication influence customer perceptions of reliability

**Understand Impact**  
Identify how reliability perceptions and expectations affect customer likelihood to adopt alternative power options, such as backup generators

## Areas of Inquiry

**Reliable Quality Factors**

- Use of technology to improve services
- Continuous quality and reliability
- Emergency and service interruption preparedness

**Service Satisfaction Factors**

- Proactivity of providing accurate information during outages
- Ease of obtaining outage information
- Organizational commitment to safety and reliability of services
- Organizational ability to keep systems safe from terrorists or cyberattacks
- Education on transmission line safety
- Investment in system safety and reliability
- Ensuring line safety from hazards
- Time of service interruption
- Outage information accuracy
- Supplying outage map using digital channels (e.g., mobile, internet, social media)

**Outage Diagnostics**

- Number of outages greater than five minutes
- Reason for lengthy outage
- Type of outage information provided (e.g., time outage began, cause of outage, updated ERT, number of people affected, etc.)

**Product Diagnostics**

- Interest in/use of offerings that allow customers to produce their own power at home
- Interest in/use of offerings that allow customers to keep power on for some or all of their home during grid outages
- Interest in/use of backup power generator
- Interest in/use of battery storage for backup

## Methodology

- 70,000+ residential electric, combination and natural gas customers
- 141 electric, natural gas and combination utilities
- Web-based survey
- Sample design: US census data and strict quotas used to ensure a trustworthy and representative sample of each evaluated utility’s customers based on age, income and race

## Subscription Details

**Publication Date: **August 2023

Deliverables

- Detailed report with analyses of data

## Investment: Contact Us

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