Utilização de indicadores convencionais e de satisfação dos usuários para avaliação da qualidade do serviço de abastecimento de água na cidade de Campina Grande/PB.

Abstract

One of the biggest challenges faced by the water utilities in the urban areas is to provide a quality service regarding aspects such as infrastructure, operation, network maintenance, quality of delivered water, users’ satisfaction etc. As the users pay more attention and stand for their rights more and more, the water utilities tend to make use of more strict criteria to guarantee that the service fulfills the minimum standards stablished by the current legislation. In order to cooperate for an improvement in the supply service offered to the population, this study suggests the development of a performance index for the water supply service in the city of Campina Grande – Paraíba (IDSA-CG). To achieve this, 22 indicators were studied and divided into five categories: operational, economic/financial, quality, infrastructural and human resources. Among the selected indicators to this study, there is one called user’s satisfaction, which was created based on a survey, in all neighborhoods of the city, to know the population’s perspective about the service provided by the water utility and, thus, being incorporated to the other indicators in order to form, as faithfully as possible, the IDSA-CG. The results related to the individual study of the indicators showed that the infrastructural indicators (network extension and coverage) and the water quality indicator (incidence of chlorine, turbidity and total coliforms, as well as conformity with sample quantity) obtained optimum values, close or equal the superior limits defined in the research. The main service drawbacks are associated to the operational indicators (losses in the distribution, macro measurement, average water consumption and energy consumption), with a need to improve the system operation, and also to the economic/financial indicators (average water charges, income evasion and electricity expenses), with a more efficient demand to trace clandestine water connections and to monitor the users in debt. Regarding the human resources indicators, the most divergent outcome compared to the expected result refers to the total employee productivity, which indicated a number of employees per water connections below the Brazilian average. The satisfaction indicator obtained a result of 45,44%, which means that the user is fairly satisfied with the service offered by the water utility in the city. Finally, based on the selected indicators, it was possible to calculate the IDSA-CG and the service currently available to the city of Campina Grande can be classified as REGULAR, with the need to introduce structural and administrative measures in order to perform a better system management.