Customer satisfaction in the Hungarian electricity distribution

The public services sector has undergone widespread changes in Central and Eastern Europe. Privatization and reorganization of the electricity industry from a traditionally centrally owned and operated system towards a market-based decentralized system has also become an important issue in Hungary. The recently privatized six electricity distributor companies operate in an assigned region and as a result the consumers cannot choose among the service providers. Thus, in this `quasi´ monopoly environment the level of consumer satisfaction has little impact on their profit or market share as it would in the case of a regular product or service in nonmonopolistic markets. Therefore the need has emerged to conduct in regular intervals surveys of consumer satisfaction in order to protect consumer interest as well as to control and supervise the quality of service provided by the distributor companies