The City of Cape Town’s Corporate Services Directorate is resuming the mobile office service after it was suspended in March 2020 due to Covid-19 and the subsequent national lockdown regulations.
Staff dedicated to this service were deployed to the City’s Corporate call centre to assist while this service was suspended.
The purpose of the Mobile Office is to bring services close to the communities as an additional customer relations service to remote areas.
The initiative provides two-way communication by giving residents an opportunity to report issues in their local area, to apply for services, or to submit fault reports.
The team attends to queries about general accounts, water, electricity, sewage, refuse collection, stolen and damaged bins, pensioner rebates, parks maintenance, illegal dumping, valuations and roads and stormwater issues.
A team of trained and equipped agents from the City’s Customer Relations Department visit the remote areas across the city to engage face-to-face with the residents and log requests. The customers are given reference numbers to quote when following up on the logged requests.
These call centre employees are fully trained in the city’s processes and are knowledgeable about the City’s various departments and programmes. They have full connectivity to the city’s computer network so they can create service requests while engaging with the customers on site.
The teams go out to at least two areas per week and cover all four City-areas every month.
‘This initiative is in keeping with our commitment to excellent service delivery and in compliance with the Batho Pele principles. The Batho Pele principles put people first and that resonates with us. We are a caring, inclusive and well-run city and the customer, our residents, are at the centre of this service delivery initiative. We want to ensure that all our residents have equal access to amenities and information. We are slowly reintegrating the service amid strict Covid-19 protocols,’ said the City’s Mayoral Committee Member for Corporate Services, Alderman Theresa Uys.
‘We have other engagement mechanisms available to the residents. These include FreeCall lines, walk-in centres and call centres, among others. However, Cape Town’s most marginalised communities often cannot make use of these due to constraints such as the cost of transport and telephone use, and so forth. Thus, we want to ease the burden by bringing the services to them. Every little bit helps our residents, especially those who may have suffered losses as the result of this pandemic,’ said Alderman Uys.
Residents will still be able to log all queries with our staff and we will endeavour to provide a quality service.
In future phases of the project, it is envisaged that the Mobile Office will be available through regular visits to service communities and a wider roll-out into new areas.
‘From this month, we have committed to visiting various communities in the city. I encourage residents to look out for information about when the service is coming to the specific areas and make use of it,’ said Alderman Uys.
Source: City Of Cape Town