City on track to resolve queries

The City of Johannesburg says it will have resolved about 200 000 billing-related queries by the end of June, in line with its March promise.

Thousands of residents had issues with their statements, after the city moved its disparate systems onto a SAP platform through a project codenamed project Phakama. The move cost at least R580 million.

In March, the city vowed to sort out all billing-related queries, which dated back to before the end of October last year, by this Saturday. All new issues would be resolved within 30 days, as long as there are no external factors.

Stan Maphologela, deputy director of customer communications in the city's revenue and customer relations department, says Johannesburg will have successfully resolved the backlog of customers, with about 200 000 technical and non-technical queries, by the end of June.

In March, there were about 100 000 queries from the city's 1.3 million accountholders that related to billing issues. Of these, 66 000 dated back from the end of October, while 35 000 were “new” queries lodged since November.

In January last year, former mayor Amos Masondo said there were about 65 000 queries that had arisen as a result of post-implementation issues with project Phakama.

Maphologela says the city has spent the past few months reducing the backlog of queries and “getting to grips with the core problems across the revenue value chain”.

“This has been a challenging process, mainly because we operate across a number of different entities.” He says these units, which include City Power, Joburg Water and Pikitup, have a role to play in improving billing accuracy.

Maphologela says the city has set up a quality assurance mechanism, where resolved queries are checked for accuracy before feedback is given to the customer, to ensure clients are satisfied with the quality of the query resolution.

“This will ensure that queries are correctly addressed on the first attempt.”

Johannesburg has also introduced a face-to-face customer feedback programme to proactively contact customers to inform them of the progress or resolution of their query, says Maphologela.