Billing finally closer to home
Billing to be regionalised, residents to be familiarised with their meter readers.
The City of Johannesburg (CoJ) recently announced that it will be launching the regionalisation of its billing this December.
This means customers will be billed on their municipal statement per region as from 1 December 2015, which for locals means being billed per Region C. The impact is expected to be noticed on January 2016 statements.
In a press statement Kgamanyane Maphologela, director of customer communications, said, “In our effort to support our customer centric approach, the billing regionalisation initiative will empower the City to understand its customers better.
“This will lead to improved efficiency and economics of scale — meaning that meter readers will find it easier to read meters per region allocation to them rather than operating in a scattered way all over seven city regions.”
A list of suburbs will be made available on CoJ’s website, www.joburg.org.za, as of 1 November for ease of reference. A list of meter reading dates per region will also become available and will henceforth be printed onto customer’s statements.
“This effort will improve billing accuracy, reduce a number of estimated bills and create a platform for shorter turnaround times on query resolutions,” Maphologela announced.
“It will also assist the City to profile customer queries per region, gather more accurate customer intelligence on every region and result in informed reporting per region to afford improvements in our operations and problem solving.”
Ward 85 councillor Carl Mann said he welcomes the regionalisation and hopes it would improve query resolution.
Here’s how it will impact residents:
• Current customers’ billing date, meter reading and due date will change.
• Customers won’t be able to change their meter reading or billing dates as it is set per region and cannot be changed.
• Some customers might receive two bills during the first month of implementation, but this will not cause a negative financial overcharge on the account as the first bill will be for a shorter period and a smaller amount. The second bill will be for a full calendar month.
• Affected customers will be advised through SMS’s and personalised letters beforehand and this will be a once-off occurence.
• Customers who currently have debit orders signed must please remember to amend their debit order dates with their financial institution to reflect the new correct deduction date.
• Residents who pay via a third party on the due date: It will reflect on CoJ’s systems three days later.
These are the benefits:
• Customers will be able to choose their own due date (between the 15th or 30th/ 31st day of the month)
• Customers will know the dates CoJ issues bills and reads meters, both water and electricity, upfront.
• There will be dedicated meter readers per region.
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