City works to bridge complaints gap
The centre provides proactive communication on power interruptions for planned maintenance on the network.
The City of Johannesburg’s Environment and Infrastructure Services Department (EISD) and City Power successfully launched a new team of customer service agents to help tackle its complaints backlog.
The 18 agents of the pilot project which went live in January, have helped the City eliminate miscommunication and improve customer service.
According to EISD MMC Michael Sun, one of the positive impacts thus far had been the significant decline in calls being escalated to the offices of the 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,” he said.
The centre also provides proactive communication on power interruptions for planned maintenance on the network.
Sun added that one of the reasons for the miscommunication with customers was the 100% use of the Forcelink System which was designed to automatically provide milestone updates to customers on logged calls.
“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 that the call centre aimed to ‘harmonise’ all of the information on interrupted services and move towards providing resolutions that met the expectation of customers.
Agents will continue to monitor the Forcelink fault logging system, and follow up with depot team leaders and dispatchers on work orders.
“The progress and efficiency of this new initiative will be closely monitored and its successes be replicated in the Johannesburg Water and Pikitup processes.”
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