28 July 2005 DRAMATIC DECREASE IN JOBURG BILLING QUERIES The City's billing problems are becoming a thing of the past with a steady decrease in the number of billing queries being raised with the City's Revenue Department. The Department's General Manager: Customer Liaison Craig Ryan says there has been a dramatic decrease in the number of new queries being recorded, and also in the number of outstanding queries. "Last year around this time we had almost 50 000 outstanding queries recorded in our system, and we faced almost 30 000 new queries every month. We also had a significant number of queries older than three months recorded in our system," he says. This month, a review of the statistics showed that for the Revenue Department: The number of new billing service requests and queries per month has declined dramatically, from 29 055 in September 2004 to only 6 881 in June 2005; The total number of service requests and queries outstanding has declined from 49 975 in June 2004 to 11 497 in June 2005. The figure as at Friday 22nd July was 8 373; There has been a reduction in the number of queries older than 3 months from 27 867 in September 2004 to 6 252 in June 2005. The figure as at 22nd July 2005 was 4 244; These levels represent less than 1% of the total number of accounts issued every month," says Ryan. "We will always have queries because that is the nature of the work we do but I believe the system changes we have made over the past six months as well as the extra effort put by the customer liaison staff throughout the City has really contributed to the overall improvement," he says. The Department is advanced in its plans to launch a customer awareness and education programme regarding billing. "We want to help our customers manage their accounts so that they can identify any problems early. One of the things we have had feedback from customers on is that the statement is too difficult to understand, so we are advanced in our plans to redesign the statement to be more consumer friendly," he says. "We also want people to understand how to read their meters so that they can also keep track of the readings and pick up problems as they occur, and so this will be another aspect of the communications campaign." Customers are reminded that queries should be logged with the City's call centre Joburg Connect at 375 5555. All queries logged should be assigned a reference number. ENDS For further information, please contact: Mandy Jean Woods Director: Marketing and Communications Department of Revenue City of Johannesburg Phone: 407 7356 Fax: 403 7738 Cell: 082 553 4211 (Please send sms if urgent) Email: mandyw@joburg.org.za