Lorain-Medina Rural Electric Cooperative achieved an 88 in this year’s American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) survey, up two points from 2019 and the highest-ever for the cooperative. Members were surveyed earlier this summer by phone and online.

Eighty-seven percent of surveyed members rated LMRE with an eight or higher on a 10-point scale on overall satisfaction and received excellent ratings in 11 of 18 categories. The remaining five categories received good ratings. Using a scale of 1 to 5, LMRE scored an excellent rating of 4.5 or higher for having friendly, courteous, and highly trained employees, showing community support, minimizing longer outages, and restoring power quickly, just to name a few.

LMRE’s lowest satisfaction ratings were for keeping members informed on the status of outages and charging reasonable rates, both with a 4.01 on the 5-point scale. The co-op uses Facebook, as well as the outage map on its website, to provide outage updates when there are 50 or more outage calls at one time. They are also investigating other avenues to continually improve their communications with their members, one of which is the recently launched e-newsletter. (To sign up for the newsletter, please visit https://bit.ly/LMREeNews.)

The average score among the other 22 Ohio electric cooperative’s surveyed in this year’s ACSI was an 87, while the nationwide, Touchstone Energy Cooperatives – electric cooperatives that are members of a national alliance – collectively scored an 85. Investor-owned utilities like First Energy and American Electric Power scored a 70 and municipal utilities, similar to Oberlin, Wellington, Grafton, Lodi, and Seville, scored a 68.