The City of Johannesburg’s (CoJ) call centre, Joburg Connect, was established to assist customers and log calls for queries to be handled in a professional and orderly manner.
This was said by Mr Kgamanyane Maphologela, the acting director of communications and stakeholder management, in reference to residents’ complaints about the call centre.
Some of the complaints residents were trying to report included leaking meters, street lights not working and posing a security threat, power outages, billing complaints and stolen water meters. Some residents also complained about old billing details provided to them instead of the latest amounts owed.
Clr Da Rocha said the call centre is nothing but a “white elephant”.
“It has become a problem to log an infrastructure breakdown complaint. The call centre does not work. The centre is not community-friendly and residents are up in arms at the fact that they can never get through to report problems. I can quite comfortably say it is useless. Residents are complaining about holding on for hours and eventually when an operator takes the call, the call is disconnected.
“This has led to residents using councillors as call centres. Councillors are not call centres, but as a representative of the people, I feel I have to help my residents with these problems,” he said.
He said a lot of residents in his ward cannot afford to make long calls.
Mr Maphologela said the call centre was implemented as an administrative communications tool to assist all customers and should not to be used as a political tool.
He said the call centre is not the only channel capable of logging a query with the CoJ. He said customers can use customer service centres, and visit www.joburg.org.za, the city’s website.
“The structure on our interactive voice response (IVR), or our self-service application, was made with our customers in mind and strives to be uncomplicated so that customers can self-direct themselves from one option to another without hanging up and redialling. Customers who have queries, or require services which are not listed on the IVR, have the option 0 to log a call.
“Queries are better managed and controlled when there is a central point. If queries are submitted to various individuals or departments, there is no mechanism for tracking them in terms of numbers and turnaround times. We also have situations where there are several staff working on a single query only to realise later that the query has already been resolved. It is inefficient and unproductive and therefore we appeal to the public to submit all queries through the official communication channels of the city,” said Mr Maphologela.
He said the call centre experiences a lot of repeat calls where logged queries or complaints have not been addressed, especially during power outages and situations where there are burst pipes.
“To address residents’ complaints, or to answer residents’ calls quicker, we have introduced auto answer, where calls will be automatically presented to any agent available. That will curb calls not being answered as well as reducing the waiting period before calls are answered. We have also increased the number of agents on shift during peak times to accommodate the increased number of calls at that moment,” said Mr Maphologela.
He urged customers to not involve their councillors but to log queries themselves to obtain a reference number that could be used in future follow ups.
“If there is a third party involved, queries are not properly logged on our system and it could take ages to resolve because of the lack of a reference number.
“Customers are advised to rather visit their nearest customer service centre where a reference number will also be issued and the query can be attended to, instead of consulting with councillors,” said Mr Maphologela.
