During the Levels of Service Strategic Sharing Group’s eighth meeting on January 21, 2022, the group completed discussions on key considerations for developing meaningful customer levels of service. They also discussed first-hand challenges and barriers to applying customer engagement strategies. Sushmitha Karunakaran, Civil Engineer at the City of Vancouver, highlighted the progress Vancouver has made in focusing its data collection efforts to better inform levels of service. Following this presentation, strategic sharing group participants discussed key considerations to developing meaningful customer levels of service and first-hand challenges and barriers to applying customer engagement strategies.

The specific themes that emerged during the discussion were:

  • Meeting regulatory requirements
    • Including: Reconciling technical with customer levels of service, transforming existing goals and targets to language that resonates, and creating a corporate culture of customer levels of service.
  • Equity in service delivery and capital spending
    • Including: Inequities highlighted by the pandemic, ensuring the engagement of historically underrepresented stakeholders, defining equity in a Canadian context, and evaluation of pre-existing programs.
  • Competing costs and staff capacity
    • Including: Balancing priorities, shifting expenditures and employee capacity, Class Environmental Assessment regulations, updating and revisiting utility plans, and aligning utility actions, targets and goals with municipal plans.

The agenda, meeting capture, guest presentation slides and utility resources can be downloaded from the documents library (see Strategic Sharing Groups – Levels of Service – Meeting 8) or from the LoS SSG webpage or from here:

Please treat these Strategic Sharing Group documents as confidential and use discretion when sharing with others in your organization.

This concludes the Advancing Levels of Service Strategic Sharing Group. Stay tuned for a final insights report. For more information, contact Jenessa Doherty, CWN Project Manager.