Towards an incentive-driven local government customer management policy: Lessons learnt from piloting of the CSIR's CARRS system

Abstract

Local government is the third sphere of government closest to the people and a tier through which basic services are delivered and its citizens' interests are represented. However, it has become a common occurrence across South Africa for citizens to be dissatisfied with the level and/or quality of service provided by their municipal councils. Failures in local government have in the recent couple of years manifested in unorthodox ways through which citizens engage with the public sector, such as sporadic and violent service delivery protests, which are also generally understood to be partly attributable to poor engagements between local government institutions and the affected citizens. On the other hand, however, there are policies and systems, such as the Municipal Systems Act, which make it a requirement for municipalities to establish customer management systems, and the Back to Basics (B2B) strategy, which also puts citizens at the centre of service delivery by identifying the need to establish accessible and effective communication platforms. This paper draws on lessons learnt from piloting of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR)'s Corrective Action Request and Report System (CARRS); a two-way incident management system used by citizens to report incidents that affect the delivery of basic services such as water supply. Preliminary findings indicate that whilst municipalities understand the concept of customer management as being central to their business, not all municipalities have embraced the implementation of effective systems that support this concept. From a policy perspective, this finding also indicates that there is lack of enforcement of customer management systems in municipalities despite the Municipal Systems Act making it a requirement. The paper concludes by making a recommendation for the development of an incentive-driven approach for enforcing customer management systems in local government.