The Environment and Infrastructure Services Department (EISD) and City Power have successfully launched a new team of customer service agents to eliminate miscommunication and improve customer experience in the City of Johannesburg.
Eighteen customer service agents went live on January 11 in a pilot project. Both EISD and City Power have noticed a positive impact in their pursuit to improve customer experience to address what has been a persistent pain point between the entity and its customers.
According to MMC for EISD Michael Sun, one such positive impact includes the significant decrease in calls being escalated to the offices of the executive mayor and the MMCs, as well as to the ward councillors.
“The customer care centre is focused on tracking calls and providing continuous milestone updates between City Power and ward councillors pertaining to outages not resolved within 24 hours until the calls are resolved and closed. Further, the centre provides pro-active communication on power interruptions for planned maintenance on the network,” explained Sun.
Some of the reasons for misalignment include the 100% use of the Forcelink System, which is designed to automatically provide milestone updates to customers on logged calls.
“Other problems experienced were the grouping and closing of calls affecting a large part of the area when the outage has been restored. The customer care centre agents now make outbound calls to follow-up on closed grouped calls to check if all customers are restored,” he added.
However, he pointed out that the aim is to harmonise all information on interrupted services and progress towards providing resolutions that meet customers’ expectations. To achieve these efforts, the new customer care team also had to undergo training on the Forcelink system.
The system is an interactive system customers use to log calls. The agents covered various modules on Forcelink that allow them to interact with technicians on the field, dispatch centres, and track milestones to provide feedback to the customers.
Sun said the customer services agents will, among other functions, also continuously monitor the current Forcelink fault logging system and follow up with the depot team leaders and dispatchers on work orders.
The agents will also make proactive calls to customers for quality assurance on work orders closed on the system, as well as provide updates and regular feedback to the internal team, councillors and targeted community chat groups of planned and unplanned outages, including informing affected customers on the Bulk SMS platform.
“The progress and efficiency of this new initiative will be closely monitored and its successes replicated in the Johannesburg Water and Pikitup processes,” said Sun.
