The city council has launched an interactive mobile application, which residents could use to log faults, report service delivery issues, receive immediate support from agents via a chat facility, receive messages that were relevant to their suburb and send positive or negative feedback regarding municipal services.
Users could also access and call any emergency service numbers via the app, receive notifications and news from the city council, and share the app with friends by submitting their phone numbers.
The Citizen Engagement Mobile Application, also known as Proof of Content (POC), allowed residents to log service faults pertaining to the Joburg Roads Agency, City Parks, Metrobus, Joburg Water, City Power, Pikitup and Rea Vaya.
The city council had come under fire from residents on many occasions regarding its customer services. Residents claimed that calls to its call centre and its entities’ call centres often went unanswered and that feedback regarding their queries was not always provided.
According to the city council, the app was efficient, responsive and ensured financial, environmental and quality service delivery sustainability.
“What we are trying to do as we move towards [a] smart city, is to ensure that residents have access to the city and its services,” the city council’s spokesperson Nthatisi Modingoane said.
“People can engage and interact with the city and the city can respond quickly and efficiently.”
He explained that the app was currently a POC to show that the city council could run a solution on both low-end phones and smart phones.
There were no costs for using the app, but it was just over 1MB for smartphones and 300KB for low-end phones; and users will be charged for the data used to download the app, as is the case with any app, Modingoane explained.
Users would need to create an account, set up a profile and submit their details to the app.
The app could be downloaded from joburg.comunity.me and was downloadable on all mobile phones.
