The City of Johannesburg (COJ) is taking active steps to improve the lives of its citizens by introducing several initiatives including a unified call centre, which has been named “One City, One Number”. From October 2010 Joburg based consumers will  have one central point of contact for all their municipal queries and complaints.

According to executive mayor Amos Masondo, by implementing this new system, “the areas of focus will be on call centres, customer relations, revenue management, and billing services”. Consumers will no longer need to call various call centres when enquiring about their water and electricity bills, everything will now be done under one roof and for consumers convenience will be open 24/7.

The call centre promises to be a self–service portal for both citizens and COJ staff to reduce the number of callers in a queue: “This service will enable customers to promptly retrieve their account-related information, for example, account balances and recorded meter readings, by furnishing their account numbers and by following interactive voice prompts” says Masondo. The call centre will also be accepting enquires that are sent via email and fax.

But how efficient will this call centre really be? If you cast your mind back a few months to the launch of the Presidency Hotline, you will recall that it was inundated with thousands of calls that the hotline staff were unable to respond to due to a lack of capacity. Do you think this new unified call centre will actually be any different?

The call centre functionality consists of calling, emailing and faxing, but what about online complaints? As more and more people are using the internet to communicate and air their frustrations, would it not be more appropriate to use an online complaints management platform in conjunction with the call centre?

As the ultimate aim of the COJ is to improve service delivery and decrease the number of complaints received, it would make sense to use the full range of communication channels to achieve this objective.

Source: itweb.co.za; Image source: joburg.org.za