Bulawayo City Council - Case Study

The Service Excellence Awards

In making the award to the city, the Contact Centre Association of Zimbabwe (Caaz) noted that Bulawayo’s customer service initiatives were considered outstanding in the local authorities’ category.

The Service Excellence Awards is organised and managed by Caaz in partnership with the Ministry of Tourism, Consumer Council of Zimbabwe and the Zimbabwe Tourism Authority as part of the international Customer Service week celebrations.

Bulawayo City

Bulawayo, the second-largest city in Zimbabwe and its industrial and commercial centre, is the first municipality to launch a call centre service to provide a centralised system for receiving customer complaints, providing feedback, and allowing management to track service performance, with the aim of improving response times.

The Council’s call centre started operating in August 2012, receiving water and sewer faults. and rolled out a month later, including fire and ambulance operations.

 

As of November 2012, it had received 3,400 calls involving water and sanitation, 5,290 ambulance calls and eighty-eight fire calls.

The call centre is fully equipped with state-of-the-art PABX and two-way radio equipment for instant, reliable communication, and is the first of its kind in Zimbabwe.

KENWOOD NEXEDGE Two-Way Radios

The KENWOOD NEXEDGE-based digital two-way radio system was designed and supplied by KENWOOD’s South Africa distributor, Global Communications and installed by Instalite Contracting. The system employs a ZETRON system infrastructure and has the capability of providing direct radio-to-radio communication, texting/paging, as well as GPS integration.

Base stations have been sited at various Council properties to provide full coverage of the City of Bulawayo, while NEXEDGE mobile radios have also been installed on fire engines, ambulances and other service vehicles. Calls to the call centre can be routed directly to relevant water and waste engineers, fire personnel, or ambulance technicians for rapid response. The PABX equipment has VOIP capabilities and is integrated with the radio equipment, allowing phone calls to be routed directly to radios where necessary.

With the use of the rapidly growing Bulawayo City Council GPS system and maps, locations for all radios can be detected at the touch of a button, giving management the ability to direct resources faster and more efficiently, especially important in the case of emergencies.