The eThekwini Municipality's Water and Sanitation Contact Centre is set to undergo a major revamp, which will include the replacement of the contact centre system to upgrade and modernise it to address various challenges.
The City said in a statement on Tuesday that the upgrade, which includes the integration of a WhatsApp channel, will enable auto logging of faults and will provide updated feedback to customers.
The upgrade will be implemented in the new financial year, 2025/26.
Acting Deputy City Manager for Trading Services Ednick Msweli provided a report during the Executive Committee meeting on Tuesday on the contact centre.
The City said he had explained that the delay in modernising the systems at the contact centre was due to budget constraints.
The report said calls and quality issues are currently being dealt with as an operational item with the recent installation of the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) to deal with congestion issues.
The report also highlighted that there were more than 80,000 calls received and 38,822 chats sent in March.
Msweli said once upgrades are implemented, the aim is for the contact centre to answer calls within a maximum of 30 seconds.
In addition, the City will continue to explore a diversity of reporting channels to reduce demand on the calling option.
The report further provided an update on the status of water supply across the City and the utilisation of water tankers.
It said water supply in the inner west, outer west, and south regions is sitting at 90 percent, with the north and central region at 85 percent.
It said the eThekwini Water and Sanitation Unit recognises that there are areas that continuously experience water outages and intermittent supply due to limited bulk water supply and system constraints. These areas are serviced with water tankers to provide relief.