Joburg promises better service

The City of Johannesburg (COJ) is implementing initiatives to improve the quality of its service to the public.

Executive mayor Amos Masondo says there will be a specific focus on call centres, customer relations, revenue management, and billing services.

“The transition phase will unfortunately lead to some frustrations to small sections of our customers. We are confident that when all the changes have been introduced, the residents of Johannesburg will enjoy a significantly improved experience when dealing with the city.”

The Hello Peter Web site shows several complaints from citizens, ranging from double billing issues and wrong billing to inadequate assistance, if any, from the call centre.

Masondo says a new unified call centre was launched this month, under the banner: “One City, One Number”. The new call centre will deal with all municipal service enquiries and complaints 24/7. “Our objective is to see this process completed by the end of October 2010.”

He explains that once the system is up and running, customers will no longer have to call different call centres for different municipal services like electricity and water.

They will also not have to follow a time-consuming system of listening to the entire menu of choices and following flexible electronic voice-prompts.

“This has in the past often led to confusion and frustration. The new contact centre will be equipped with a comprehensive all-in-one solution for unified communications.”

Masondo says with the new software implemented, the COJ and its citizens will have the benefit of self-service functionality to reduce call queues.

“This service will enable customers to promptly retrieve their account-related information, for example, account balances and recorded meter readings, by furnishing their account numbers and by following interactive voice prompts.”

He adds that the contact centre will have real-time e-mail and fax capability, which will enable incoming e-mails and faxes to be part of the contact centre queues. “Customers will be able to send either an e-mail or fax, and the customer interaction centre will enable business to handle these correspondences real-time as either part of the contact centre queues or dedicated workgroup (that is front-office support).”

In future, the customer relations agent will be able to send an SMS to the customer to acknowledge receipt of customer mail and/or fax, according to Masondo.

He also says accurate forecasting and electronic scheduling of contact centre agents per shift will be achieved. “Contact centre supervisors will be able to monitor the quality of engagement between agents and customers. This quality monitoring function will enable supervisors to assist agents when responding to customer queries by assisting them with the appropriate response to agents without the customer hearing the conversation.”

Masondo adds that the COJ has decentralised applications for clearances in an effort to improve the system.

This comes after the Democratic Alliance called for a probe into the backlog of clearance certificates.

Houses cannot be transferred into their new owners' names because of a backlog at the COJ. In June, the Johannesburg Attorneys' Association (JAA) said thousands of rate clearance certificates have been outstanding since October, when the city started upgrading its computer systems to SAP.

Despite requests from ITWeb, the COJ did not explain the details around the decentralisation by the time of publication.

“A pilot has gone live at Sandton Civic and Roodepoort Civic. We will roll it out eight more customer service centres as from 1 September,” says Masondo.

The eight other centres are Midrand Civic, Randburg Civic, Roodepoort Townhall, Jabulani Civic, Eldorado Civic, Lenasia Civic, Ennedale Civic, and Eureka House.

The mayor also says the COJ is making progress with Project Phakama in an initiative to clean up billing issues, improve the integrity of the database and ensure customers receive accurate bills for rates and services.

The move forms part of the city's Programme Phakama transformation initiative. While the project was implemented in February 2006 and scheduled to be complete in 2008, it was delayed due to limited resources and skills shortages in the municipality.

“At the core of these changes is the introduction of a new internal system that will give the customer a single entry point into the city, with one customer database on a common IT platform. It is inevitable that current customer practices will change as a result of the new IT foundation.”

The changes include new billing dates, meter reading dates, invoicing dates, banking details, issuing of refunds and clearances, and changes in the sourcing of statements.

Masondo says there are currently more than 1.2 million customers registered on the city's database. Their details are being captured and consolidated into a unified system, enabling residents to receive one bill from the City of Johannesburg.

“SAP is designed as a system which forces the city and its customers to correctly provide the data needed for billing to take place accurately. In the case where this is not meeting the required standards, the system will force a correction, which will require intervention. This has influenced the time it takes to provide a bill to customers. In order to continue this process effectively, it is necessary to complete the data requirement.

“We are aware that some accounts have been impacted by not receiving monthly statements regularly in the last months. This is due to a technical glitch on our system on certain accounts. However, there are internal processes put in place to handle and deal with this problem.”