Johannesburg municipal electricity utility City Power has begun taking essential services directly into residential areas through a new mobile outreach initiative. The rollout follows initial service deployments in areas such as Princeton, where residents turned out in large numbers to resolve long-standing electrical and account matters.
The initiative was established after recent customer service surveys highlighted public dissatisfaction with outage response turnarounds, billing queries, and the difficulty of reaching municipal offices. Speaking in an interview with Salaamedia, City Power spokesperson Isaac Mangena explained that the utility is actively reshaping how it responds to community grievances.
“What we are trying to do is basically to bring the service to the doorstep of our customers because our customers are really important,” Mangena said. “We’re responding also to the survey that has been made by City Power customer service survey that basically indicated that the customers were not really happy with our responses.”
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Bringing technical and billing support directly to residents
While the conversion of the eight depots into customer service centres improved accessibility, many residents still faced transport hurdles in reaching those central offices.
To bridge this operational gap, the utility deployed dedicated mobile service trailers to bring technicians and customer agents directly into local wards. The mobile units are configured to address complex metering faults, outage backlogs, and billing disputes on location.
“We are coming out with the trailers and in those trailers we have packed everything that you want,” Mangena stated. “If you are looking for a metering solution, if you are looking for an outage that has been going on for a long time, you’ll find the technicians in the trailer, you’ll find people that will basically be able to deal with your query inside the trailer. You’ll also actually take the technician home to ensure that they deal with that issue in that ward at that time on that day.”
Mangena noted that significant queues during early activations confirmed the necessity of bringing frontline staff straight to the community. The municipal entity intends to schedule ongoing community visits across additional wards in the coming weeks.
Image via Moneyweb.
