Level of Service Goals

Level of service goals should define what customers and utility staff can expect from their water, wastewater, or stormwater system. These goals are a way to communicate progress in implementing a system’s plan, demonstrate ongoing commitment to the community vision, encourage accountability, and suggest course corrections that can help ensure continued progress toward the mission. Some goals will offer win-win solutions and unlock multiple benefits by tackling several problems at once. For example, the co-benefits provided by a green infrastructure installation may not be part of the initial goal but will likely still be something the community cares about. It is important to communicate those co-benefits and the impacts that they will have on community members’ quality of life.

Level of Service goals can be focused on one part of utility operations or for the utility as a whole or both. Larger utilities may have different sets of Level of Service goals for each department or group. If your utility operates multiple treatment processes, separate Level of Service goals by process, such as drinking water, wastewater, and stormwater.  

Level of service goals should be a combination of internal goals and external goals. Internal goals are those goals that define system operations while external goals are items that directly impact customers. Developing external goals provides a great opportunity for system staff to have conversations with customers to understand their priorities and the level of service they expect. Including customers in the development of goals helps ensure that implementation addresses the desires and concerns of residents and businesses in the community, and that the operations align with customer expectations. Goals should not be focused solely on the short-term. Long-term goals can help staff and customers understand the broader impact of infrastructure investments and maintenance schedules. For example, goals for green assets can take months, years, or even decades to achieve. Slow growing assets like forests and vegetated swales take years to reach desired service. Drinking water treatment facilities can take years to upgrade and rehabilitate. Utilities should include long-term goals to reflect these extended processes. 

 Developing Level of Service goals can be challenging. High-quality goals must be meaningful, consistent, useful, unique, and most importantly, measurable. Without the ability to measure a goal, there is no way to communicate progress to the community or assess whether the system’s actions are having the desired result. Measurable goals will require systems to collect data to track goal performance and create key performance indicators (KPI) to delineate success and failure. Because of the time and effort that will go into tracking goals and developing KPIs, systems should be realistic in the number of goals they set. These goals should be simple and expanded only when solid data or metrics are available.