Customers' satisfaction with clean drinking water provided by the Lahore Cantonment Board (LCB), Pakistan

Clean drinking water supply services lie at the centre of household activities and maintenance of public health. In the recent past, a phenomenal increase in the above mentioned activities mainly in the urban areas has created an urgent need for improved water management. It is keeping this in mind that urban water distribution networks all over the world are under immense pressure to supply round the clock clean drinking water for household customers. Any disruption or inconsistency in this service even though for a short while has an unpleasant effect on all sorts of customers. For these reasons water supply agencies as well as their regulators are becoming increasingly sensitive to customer protection issues and customers' opinions about the service quality and performance. To ensure customers' satisfaction the public utilities are adopting benchmarking concepts with a view to comparing their own practices and processes with top performers in the same trade. In the context of customer satisfaction this approach helps them to identify and adopt best practices to improve their own processes. This aim of this research is to find out whether the residents of Lahore Cantonment are satisfied or not with the clean drinking water provided by the LCB. This inquisition revolves around three main research questions that encapsulate the main aspects of clean drinking water that are vital to the customers of LCB and go on to determine their level of satisfaction. The first research question is about the overall satisfaction of people with the clean drinking water whereas the second one focuses specifically on the aspects of the water that the customers have complaints against such as quality, quantity, continuity and price. The last question concentrates on the satisfaction of the customers with the responsiveness of LCB to their complaints. This research is exploratory as it seeks to find out whether the customers are satisfied or not with the clean drinking water provided by LCB. In order to carry out this research, survey strategy has been used with households as units of analysis. This survey served as a basic investigative tool in order to prove or disprove the hypothesis. The research was carried out in Lahore Cantonment (population 268,166) where two levels of households with respect to income were taken into consideration i.e. high and low income. The data was divided into primary and secondary data. The research instruments were a combination of a survey with questionnaires, in-depth and semi-closed interviews. Questionnaires were used to collect primary data from customers with respect to their response regarding the quality, quantity, continuity of water, monthly tariff, and disposal of complaints by the LCB authorities. Semi-structured and in-depth interviews were used to collect primary data from the officials of the LCB, and others. The secondary data was collected through visits to the Record Room of LCB and the information consisted of readily available compendia and reports of LCB. Frequency distributions and percentages were the main analytical methods. The display methods used were tables and graphs. It was found out during the fieldwork that LCB's water supply systems were characterized by contamination of the clean drinking water through sewerage water entering the old and rusty water pipelines, no proper treatment other than chlorination, intermittent water supply (8-10 hrs a day), low per capita water supplied per day, and low responsiveness to customer complaints. The results of the research show that although a majority of customers belonging to both the high and low income areas are overall satisfied with the clean drinking water provided by LCB but a deeper analysis of questionnaires survey and interviews (corresponding to the second and third research question) revealed that owing to various reasons more than a quarter of them were not satisfied with various aspects of clean drinking water. It is startling to know that LCB has no mechanism in place to ascertain the customers' satisfaction and neither is it using any form of benchmarking and key performance indicators to measure, monitor and improve its performance. This is the major reason why more than a quarter of the customers of both the income groups have serious reservations about the various aspects of clean drinking water such as quality, quantity and continuity, and the responsiveness of the staff to customer complaints. The situation is expected to get worse if immediate corrective actions are not taken by the LCB soon.