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The Democratic Alliance (DA) embarked on an oversight inspection on 24 November of the Mangaung Metro Municipality Call Centre. This comes after councillors received complaints from the public that they are unable to report municipal services issues at the call centre. Complaints received included that phone calls are not answered or disconnected after a few minutes.

The call centre operates on an in-house system that was developed to cater for reporting of services issues by the public. This system lacks automation to transfer reported incidents to the relevant department to attend to the problem. The system can also not manage calls that were unattended by the agents and this causes frustration with the public.

Only 18 agents are employed at the call centre for a metro population of more than 800 000 residents. The DA is concerned because the international benchmark per call centre agent is 450 residents per agent. The call centre receives more than 800 calls per day. During the oversight there was no supervisor in attendance to assist the agents.

The agents work shifts daily and during our visit only 3 agents were on shift. Reported incidents via email are supposed to be attended to by the relevant supervisor. Residents complained that their emails are not answered. The call centre receives up to 100 emails daily.

The call centre also does not have a backup system in place when loadshedding is implemented or when power failure occurs. Every call centre system needs to have UPS power backup in place for services to continue during power failures.

The call centre is the first point of contact for residents to report municipal incidents which include water leaks, sewerage overflows etc. The City manager did not implement the basic steps of managing a successful call centre of customer satisfaction, determine your team's call centre software needs, select the right call centre software, train your team to navigate your call centre software, monitor your team's performance and support the team with sufficient first and second line support.

When the DA governs the metro, we will implement a software system that will enable residents to report incidents on the website and develop an application to report incidents on their cell phones. Service satisfaction is of the upmost importance where the DA governs, and we need the support for the residents of Mangaung to make this a reality. We have requested to meet with the HOD of Corporate Services and address this matter.

Issued by DA