This is according to mayor Mondli Gugubele during the latest council meeting.
He pointed out that the waiting time at the centre has improved from more than 20 minutes to less than a minute; abandonment rate of calls has improved from more than 80 per cent to less than 10 per cent; the municipality has achieved both call waiting time and abandonment rate targets; all customer service requests are logged on EMIS irrespective of the origin; and the centre now handles in excess of 2 500 calls a day.
“Our intervention at the call centre has also resulted in a massive leap in opinion and community satisfaction level graph, according to the latest Gauteng City Region Observatory research results.
“Our people are becoming more and more satisfied and confident in our city.
“Despite all this, we are the first to acknowledge that there is still plenty of room for improvement. In this regard, the city is now in the process of establishing a direct dedicated link for the call centre outside the existing bandwidth, to enhance the facility’s response time.
“Our target is to complete this process within the next couple of weeks. As we strive for quality service at all times, we continue to have regular training for our agents on both customer care and telephone etiquette.
“CRM is presently locked in with discussions with labour in an effort to increase the number of shifts at the call centre, to cater for shorter working hours so that we minimise staff fatigue to further improve on the quality of service.”
The mayor said that it is important for the metro to manage the flow of information in the interest of Ekurhuleni.
“Communication is the way. If we do not communicate, the people are left in a state of uncertainty, which easily results in irrational decision-making and behaviour, thus, leading to avoidable service delivery protests.
“Our improved call centre has improved our communication with the community and as a result changed perceptions about the city and its levels of service delivery.
“It is a process we shall continue to pursue until we get it right. As we soldier on, we are now engaging on a data-cleansing drive, to get correct contact numbers of our residents and stakeholders, in order to increase the city’s communication channels via SMS and social media platforms such Facebook and Twitter.
“We are further engaging cellphone service providers to get metro residents contact details for proactive communication. All this will be done through due legal processes.”
