At least a dozen employees of Southern California Edison Co. manipulated customer satisfaction surveys by tricking a polling firm into calling people who would give glowing reviews -- namely, the employees themselves.
Edison, which disclosed the scam Monday, said the surveys helped persuade state regulators to grant the utility $28 million in special service awards between 1997 and 2000. Edison said it was looking into whether the employees were aiming to inflate their own bonuses.
The utility, which was tipped off by an insider, said it hadn't finished investigating the matter but pledged to return to customers any rewards it didn't earn.
"Is Southern California Edison's service so bad that employees are cooking the books in order to make things look better than they really are?" said Douglas Heller, executive director of the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights in Santa Monica. "This is an eye-opener."
Edison said the employees, who worked in the transmission and distribution unit, doctored computerized data that was sent to a firm hired to survey supposedly random customers about their experiences with utility staff, said Gil Alexander, a spokesman for Southern California Edison, the region's largest power company and a subsidiary of Rosemead-based Edison International.
Edison didn't identify the employees, who were suspended Monday pending the results of the investigation.
Details of the deception were still unfolding Monday. Early in the day, Edison said the employees deleted customers' phone numbers and substituted the numbers of family members and friends who would presumably offer high praise for the utility workers when the survey firm called. Later, Edison said the employees, after encounters with unhappy customers, would enter invalid phone numbers so those customers could never be reached. Alternatively, the employees would enter their own home or cellphone numbers and, when called by the survey firm, would provide flattering testimonials.
"It would appear that they did it in order to ensure that they would be measured as high performers and their department would meet its year-end goals and get the maximum payout," Alexander said.
The employees implicated so far are staff-level workers, though the company hasn't ruled out the possibility that a manager orchestrated the effort, Alexander said.
