Stakeholder involvement as a strategic instrument to strengthen customer service : the case of the City of Ekurhuleni

Abstract

The new democratic dispensation ushered in by the 1994 elections introduced the notion of ‘people-centred development’. The principles of people-centred development were advocated by the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) (1994:2) and formulated as "the building blocks of development, public participation, social learning, empowerment and sustainability”. Notably, the deepening tenets of grassroots democracy and harnessing of participatory governance in government settings were promoted as instruments to overcome the legacy of separate development (Davids et al., 2014:18). However, it became apparent that these ideals were hampered by several underlying driving and constraining factors which ‘hollowed out’ the state of municipalities in the country including poor service delivery, being hotbeds of corruption, maladministration, graft, thieving, inefficiency and ineffective stakeholder involvement practices. This situation generally resulted in mainly local governments in South Africa finding it difficult to maintain healthy relationships with local communities (Shabangu and Oskiutycz, 2018:199). This, in turn, led to legitimacy challenges for municipal councils. Moreover, South African municipalities have continued to witness militant service delivery protests, a lack of effective and productive stakeholder involvement and low levels of public satisfaction with the state of local government and poor customer service delivery in the country. In this research study, the extent to which stakeholders in the local government environment are involved in strengthening customer service is interrogated as the focus area. As a result, the primary objective of this study is to determine and analyse the underlying driving and constraining factors that influence effective stakeholder involvement and to develop a strategic stakeholder involvement instrument in strengthening customer service in the CoE. The study confined itself to two target populations; namely, managers of customer care centres of the CoE and a representative sample of stakeholder organisations that interact with these centres including CBOs, NGOs; small, medium and macro enterprises (SMMEs); faith-based organisations (FBOs) and sports organisations. The sample was purposively selected. A qualitative approach was used for this study. The rationale for using mixed methods is to enable the researcher to gain a more integrated, multidimensional, and combined perspective with the potential to produce more valid research outcomes by tapping the strengths of each research paradigm. The researcher uses the literature review as a point of

departure to uncover gaps in the current knowledge and pinpoint areas that should be further probed through empirical investigation. Moreover, data presented in this study are mainly derived from the responses of participants to the ten questionnaires that were distributed to three stakeholder organisations and were randomly sampled from six main stakeholder grouping types of the City of Ekurhuleni as well as responses to the semi-structured interviews that were conducted with six of the 20 customer care area managers (n=6). Notably, in this study, the ethical considerations as espoused by Mouton (2009:240) were adhered to. The study contributes to the body of knowledge on the effective involvement of stakeholder organisations in strengthening customer service in South African metropolitan municipalities in general and the CoE in particular. Furthermore, the study will highlight barriers and impediments faced by stakeholder organisations in trying to strengthen customer service and provide recommendations aimed at improving stakeholder involvement in municipal decision-making processes. The study’s key contribution will be the development of a new strategic instrument to strengthen customer service in the CoE. While the locus of this study will be the CoE, information from this study will not be useful to the CoE only, but also to other municipalities across South Africa as a learning experience. Additionally, the significance of the study’s main key contribution towards the advancement of a new scientific body of knowledge on effective and productive involvement of stakeholder organisations in strengthening customer service in South African metropolitan municipalities in general and the CoE, in particular, is structured in several main domains: • Contributions to the corpus source of knowledge informing the discipline of Public Administration / Management and Governance; • Contributions to the scholarly discourse regarding local democracy, participation structures and strategies, and stakeholder engagement; and • Practical application value by proposing the contours and content of a strategic stakeholder involvement instrument for the implementation by metropolitan municipalities in South Africa, with specific reference to the CoE; • Creating a more responsive administration and customer orientation; and

Lastly, as its main contribution to the corpus source of knowledge on public administration / management and governance, this study successfully located the significance of stakeholder involvement within the customer service domain.