Abstract
Local government in South Africa is no longer exclusively a function of national or provincial government; it is now regarded as a sphere rather than a tier of government. Section 152 of the Constitution of South Africa, 1996 stipulates the objectives of the local sphere of government, among which is ensuring the provision of services to communities in a sustainable manner. Poor or lack of service delivery by local authorities has received much media attention of late. Monitoring customer-focused service delivery could therefore be a critically important means to effect quality service delivery in local government. At its core this approach emphasises the treatment of municipal service users and the citizenry as customers. This article contends that conceptually customer-focused quality service delivery may potentially lever local government authorities out of the poor service delivery rut that has come to render some municipal authorities ineffective and inefficient and hence dysfunctional. At a conceptual level the article grapples with the elusive concept of service quality and the often contested concept of customer and proxy measures for monitoring service quality in the public sector. Citing British and South African customer-focused quality service delivery tools and initiatives, the article interrogates the efficacy of such initiatives and perspectives for monitoring customer-focused quality service delivery in the local sphere of government.
Highlights
Local government in South Africa is regarded as a sphere rather than a tier of government
The customer-focused service delivery monitoring approach is conceptually new in the public sector as it tends to treat the citizenry as customers
The most critical objectives of this approach are the improvement of public sector service delivery through, among other things, consulting users of services, setting service standards, increasing access to all facilities, ensuring courtesy when dealing with citizens, providing more useful information, increasing openness and transparency, rectifying mistakes and failures, providing the best possible value for money, enhancing accountability, encouraging innovation, rewarding excellence and forming wider partnerships with the community
Summary
Local government in South Africa is regarded as a sphere rather than a tier of government. Common threads evident in public service delivery reform, especially in the United Kingdom, include among other measures, ‘entrepreneurial’ local governments that promote competition or quasi-competition between service providers Such local governments empower citizens by devolving control from the bureaucracy into the community, measure performance, focus not on inputs but on outcomes, are driven by goals and their missions, not rules and regulations, and define service users as customers (Morphet, 2008:66). Quality is perceived as a function of accepted quality standards and service delivery plan outcomes and service delivery targets associated with a particular sphere of interest, appropriateness to purpose, through the ability to consistently meet or exceed perceived customer and citizen needs Further to this, it can be perceived in terms of a local authority’s capacity for continuous improvement of processes and systems using feedback from service users as customers. It is critically important to note that despite the wide resonance of this term in the private sector, the very concept of customer in the public sector is problematic
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