We take seriously our responsibility to keep our employees informed and engaged. We stay connected to our employees with an Intranet site ("AEPNow") that provides tools, information and resources; a monthly employee newsletter ("Inside AEP") that is mailed home to ensure we communicate with all employees; quarterly employee webcasts scheduled around earnings announcements and other specialized communications.
In 2007, we launched an internal blog that allows employees to sound off on a range of issues important to them. "Open Mike" is another employee forum that meets privately and regularly with the CEO. Participation in Open Mike rotates to allow for broader participation; 25 employees are part of this program each year.
One of our challenges is employee understanding of sustainability, especially as it relates to their jobs day-to-day. During our employee stakeholder meetings we heard that if it had not been for their participation in this process, many employees would not have known about the report or AEP's sustainability strategy.
Clearly, we have to change this view. We are developing a cross-functional team to create an action plan for routinely incorporating sustainability into training, new employee orientation and individual goal development. We have begun a communications initiative, called "Sustainability in Action," that will regularly use existing newsletters and web-based tools to identify examples of what sustainability means to AEP and how it affects employees and the company's business strategy.
Our customers are also part of our stakeholder engagement process. We communicate with them in many ways, including monthly bill inserts, customer newsletters, media advertising, web sites, customer call center agents, field representatives and account managers. Our customer service employees and call center representatives have direct contact with customers on all aspects of our business. We survey our customers quarterly and last year we saw customer satisfaction increase from 83 percent in 2006 to 83.7 percent in 2007. AEP ranks 10th among 60 utilities nationally in customer satisfaction.
