Survey of Stakeholders
Clients of the Authority include the owners and operators of gas, electricity, rail and water infrastructure, users and consumers of these services and other interested parties.
While legislation limits the Authority's requirement to prepare key performance indicators to its management functions, this reporting year the Authority has decided to undertake a customer satisfaction survey to measure its effectiveness and efficiency in performing its functions as a whole and achieving its stated objectives. This is in accordance with the Authority's commitment to good corporate governance, accountability and transparency.
The Authority engaged an independent consultant to assess stakeholders' satisfaction with the Authority's performance.
The Authority provided the consultants with a list of 91 potential survey respondents. Attempts were made to contact all potential respondents by telephone and 76 stakeholders completed questionnaires. This gave a response rate of approximately 83.5 per cent, sufficient to give the overall results within a sampling error of plus or minus 5 per cent at the 95 per cent confidence level.
Government departments or agencies represented 28.9 per cent of respondents, licensees made up 23.7 per cent, infrastructure owners represented 19.7 per cent, non-government organisations accounted for 6.6 per cent and infrastructure owners/users/licensees represented 5.3 per cent of respondents.
The Authority will utilise the outcomes of this survey to streamline its processes, improve its effectiveness and efficiency in performing its functions and ensure that the services it provides meet its stakeholders' needs and expectations.
Survey Results
Chart 1 – Overall Satisfaction with ERA
Overall scores showed a high level of satisfaction. 67.1 per cent of respondents were "at least satisfied" with the Authority's performance. A further 31.6 per cent were neither satisfied nor dissatisfied and only 1.3 per cent of respondents said they were dissatisfied.
Chart 2 – Satisfaction with Authority Goals
The highest levels of "at least satisfied" scores were obtained for promoting regulatory outcomes that are in the public interest, preventing abuse of monopoly power, addressing issues in an effective manner and providing adequate information on relevant matters. All of these goal areas achieved "at least satisfied" scores of 64.4 per cent.
The lowest "at least satisfied" score was obtained for "achieving a high level of confidence in regulatory decisions" (48.7 per cent). It should be noted that, while this score is lower than for the other Authority goals, it still reflected a high level of satisfaction with only 2.6 per cent of respondents advising that they were dissatisfied.
Chart 3 – Comparing Authority Goals with Perceived Importance of the Areas
Respondents were asked how important each of the Authority goals were to them. This chart shows a comparison of overall mean scores for satisfaction and importance across all goal areas. This shows the gap between importance and satisfaction for each issue. The chart suggests a need for increased satisfaction levels to meet stakeholder expectations. However, it should be noted that satisfaction levels are already quite high across all areas.
