At the start of this new year, the City of Cape Town would like to ensure that all its residents know how to contact the municipality with their enquiries or reports. The City encourages the public to be the eyes and ears on the ground for any matter that affects residents in Cape Town and to make contact, whether it be safety or service related or to enquire about a specific process or resources available to residents which can improve or simplify their daily lives. Here’s how to contact the City.

The City’s Customer Care Centre can be reached 24/7 on 0860 103 089. The agents at the centre aim to provide residents with a reliable point of contact and reassurance that from that point onwards the customer relations team will handle the request or report as efficiently as possible by directing it to the most relevant team to address.

Between 1 November 2021 and 31 January 2022, the City’s Customer Care Contact Centre alone handled 141 347 calls, and for this period 89% of these customer requests were finalised. This is apart from the City Transport Information Centre and Public Emergency line’s calls.

‘As a City, we want to make sure all residents know exactly how to get through to us, and assure them that our professional and committed agents know how to direct issues from that first point of contact. There are times of high call volume periods, and we thank residents for their patience on those days, or perhaps when their specific query takes longer than anticipated to be resolved. We can however guarantee residents that there is not one call or written query that falls on deaf ears or is overlooked. A service request cannot just disappear from our system once received, each one has to be addressed. It will be seen to, investigated and directed to the correct officials, depots or district offices. We are here, eager to help and your queries will not be overlooked.’

‘We want to thank our Cape Town residents who have taken an active role in keeping this a well-run and safe City by logging service requests with us and reporting issues that affect their fellow residents,’ said the City’s Mayoral Committee Member for Corporate Services, Alderman Theresa Uys.

The City wants to encourage those residents who have not made contact with the City with their various queries to do so in the following ways:

• For any life threatening emergency which requires assistance from enforcement authorities or rescue services, residents are to call 107 from a landline, 112 (toll-free) or 021 480 7700 from a cell phone

• For general enquiries including water, electricity, accounts and motor vehicle licences residents can call the City’s 24 hour customer call centre on 0860 103 089 or contact.us@capetown.gov.za . A digital option to get service requests through to the City is to register to the City of Cape Town’s e-services via www.capetown.gov.za/eservices and to proceed to log your specific request via www.capetown.gov.za/servicerequests . Here residents can report and track a fault, a concern or a service request online. Additional benefits residents will find once registered on www.capetown.gov.za/eservices are access to useful portals such as the City’s procurement portal; tender portal; job search function; the general property valuation roll and city map and zoning viewer to name a few. These portals provide easy access to information which many residents usually enquire about or are not sure how to obtain from an organisation the size of the City.

For residents who are not able to contact the City via a private telephone line the City advises that they make use of the FreeCall lines located at various municipal and community buildings throughout Cape Town. These allow you to contact the municipality directly at no cost in municipal buildings, housing offices, cash offices, libraries and community facilities across the city.

• For all Transport related queries and issues pertaining to all commuters in Cape Town, residents can call the City’s 24 hour free Transport Information Centre (TIC) on 0800 65 64 63 from any phone or Transport.Info@capetown.gov.za . Issues such as potholes, flooding, fallen trees, open manholes and chemical spills are also reported to the TIC.

‘I request residents to please save this important information, keep it at hand and to get in touch when you need to. Cape Town is a growing city, with growing needs and the demand on the City for adequate customer relations is high, but we endeavour to meet that expectation, and want to thank the hundreds of residents who have taken the time to rate our services and send through reviews. We appreciate the recognition and applaud our hard working call centre agents for their service. We acknowledge there is room for improvement and can assure residents that we are working on a number of enhancements which will further improve their customer experience. These will only go live over the next six months,’ said Alderman Uys.

The City currently provides customers with five status updates during the resolution of their request to keep them informed of what the City is doing to attend to their request or a fault. Residents are updated via SMS or email, depending on the method of communication they have selected. The customer relations team is currently also working on a custom message which will be used to inform customers of the reason for the closure of their notification which will provide some added transparency.

In order to address certain issues that need to be managed closely in Cape Town the City also has various additional services and direct contact lines which residents can use. Below are the most important service related helplines:

24 hour Illegal occupancy / land invasion hotline: 021 596 1999

Toll free cable theft hotline: 0800 222 771

Vandalism hotline: 021 480 7700

The toll free street people line: 0800 872 201

The toll free 24 hour Alcohol and Drugs  hotline: 0800 435 748 (0800 HELP 4 U)

Solid Waste hotline for  issues including illegal dumping, wheelie bins and general cleaning on 0860 103 089;  021 400 4302 or wastewise@capetown.gov.za

The City encourages all residents to please save these important contact details in order to simplify how they get in touch with the municipality.

Source: City Of Cape Town