Customer complaints and concerns about their drinking water quality provide valuable information for assessing potential risks when utilities routinely analyze these data. This research presents strategies to evaluate complaint patterns for diversity and frequency of descriptors and to apply exceedance frequencies to evaluate when the complaints were indicative of a water quality problem. Mean complaint frequency ranged between 0.2 and 2.6 complaints per 1,000 customers per year for different utilities. The most common temporal pattern was a shift to lower complaint frequencies on weekends. Weekday and seasonal patterns were slight and varied by utility. Autocorrelation analysis indicated little predictive ability in the number of complaints from one day to the next. Exceedance probabilities, however, could be used to set alarm values indicating atypical complaint frequencies. A combination of high frequency of complaints together with consistency of descriptors, that is, low diversity, was indicative of episodic water quality problems.
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Research Article|
January 16 2014
Statistical approaches for analyzing customer complaint data to assess aesthetic episodes in drinking water
Daniel L. Gallagher;
1Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, 418 Durham Hall, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061-0246, USA
E-mail: dang@vt.edu
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Andrea M. Dietrich
Andrea M. Dietrich
1Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, 418 Durham Hall, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061-0246, USA
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Journal of Water Supply: Research and Technology-Aqua (2014) 63 (5): 358–367.
Article history
Received:
August 02 2013
Accepted:
December 06 2013
Citation
Daniel L. Gallagher, Andrea M. Dietrich; Statistical approaches for analyzing customer complaint data to assess aesthetic episodes in drinking water. Journal of Water Supply: Research and Technology-Aqua 1 August 2014; 63 (5): 358–367. doi: https://doi.org/10.2166/aqua.2014.144
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