Two things that can trash an electric utility's reputation with its customers are long outages and unexpectedly high bills. In both cases, how a utility responds can either mitigate or exacerbate the damage.
Liberty Utilities is facing anger from its customers over high bills and, so far, it doesn't seem to be responding very well. So many of its customers in the Ozarks have received unexpectedly high bills that they have started an online petition asking the utility to look into the matter, according to the story to which I linked.
The company has issued a statement about the bills, which some customers are attributing to their new smart meters, and it's largely boilerplate. If Liberty Utilities doesn't up its game in terms of both finding out the reasons for the bills and better communicating that it shares its customers concerns about them, the company could take a long-lasting hit to its reputation.
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