City interface is a busy place

IT takes plenty of planning and effort for a huge entity such as the City of uMhlathuze to communicate with its ratepayers and residents.

This is especially so in terms of handling round-the-clock requests, complaints and queries from the public.

The City has a three-fold response mechanism at the heart of its service delivery setup: the 24-hour Call Centre, the Customer Service Desk and the switchboard.

The sheer volume of calls and visits this trio of services attends to is formidable.

The Corporate Services quarterly report (Oct-Dec 2015) presented at last week’s Executive Committee meeting showed no fewer than 204 393 incoming and 201 247 outgoing calls logged at the switchboard, which is manned daily by four staff members from 7.20am to 4pm.

Over the same period, the 24-hour call centre logged 2 117 calls.

Among others, these related to water leaks (210), sewer blockages and overflows (198), street lights (179), power failures (712), water meter leaks (176) and no water (92).

Generally, these complaints are referred by the nine operators on shift rotation for attention of the Department of Infrastructure & Technical Services.

In the case of checking and unblocking of accounts, or requests for water and electricity reconnections, the Department of Financial Services is the referral point.

In addition, the 24-hour hotline team also disseminates information on service delivery issues such as load shedding and water cuts.

At the Civic Centre building in Richards Bay, the City’s Customer Service Desk is manned by four staff members who attend to walk-in customers.

As well as referring clients to the relevant officials, they deal with matters such as applications for water and electricity connections, distribution of tender documents and registering of new electricity meters.

In the quarter under discussion they dealt with 76 new water applications and 43 new electricity connections.