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Questions over Home Affairs’ high customer satisfaction statistics

Source: The Mercury, 28/03/2024

Home Affairs Minister Aaron Motsoaledi outlined the customer satisfaction statistics in his response to a recent parliamentary question from Cope president Mosiuoa Lekota regarding the progress made in resolving the myriad issues faced by clients.
While a 2022/2023 Home Affairs survey showed generally high satisfaction scores from clients for the service they received at the department’s offices, opposition parties have said the statistics are misleading.
Home Affairs Minister Aaron Motsoaledi outlined the customer satisfaction statistics in his response to a recent parliamentary question from Cope president Mosiuoa Lekota regarding the progress made in resolving the myriad issues faced by clients.
“Customer satisfaction score for each service channel was generally high with scores above 70%. However, harbours and airports had the highest satisfaction score of over 90% whereas refugee centres had the lowest score of 73%,” the minister said.
Motsoaledi said when all systems are working and the offices do not experience load shedding, which now affects network coverage in the offices, “the average waiting period for pre-booked services is seven minutes; for birth, marriage, and death services is 10 minutes and 15 minutes for walk-in services”.
He said queues were constantly being monitored to prevent people waiting in queues from being asked to come back on another day.
The minister said the objective of the survey was to assess citizens’ perceptions and satisfaction level with services, identify and document the main problems in service delivery, assess which areas need improvement and provide appropriate recommendations to the management to improve these services.
He said 96% of the customers surveyed endorsed the department’s pricing structure as affordable.
The minister added that most of the customers were serviced on the same day; however, there were some who had to visit a Home Affairs office more than once for the same service.
Motsoaledi noted that the findings showed a general improvement in queue management, with an increase in the scores across the various customer interaction points.
He said the department was generally praised for effectiveness in terms of its capability to deliver expected output, but criticised for lack of efficiency.
“Inaccessibility, waiting in unmanaged queues for long hours, and unwelcoming staff attitude emerged as the most popular barriers to service excellence at Home Affairs offices. These also include the ability of staff to resolve queries, wait to get attention, and fair treatment,” said Motsoaledi.
In response to the statistics, IFP spokesperson on Home Affairs Liezl van der Merwe said the department was crippled by corruption, systems that were perpetually off-line, long queues, and a lack of staff and modern systems.
She said the IFP believed the department needed to be completely revamped into a modern, fit-for-purpose department, which would mean investing heavily in infrastructure and technology.
“The fact is, that many South Africans spend a day or more in a Home Affairs queue trying to access paperwork. Paperwork which is often desperately needed to access a grant or a job opportunity,” said Van der Merwe.
DA spokesperson on Home Affairs Angel Khanyile said it seemed like the minister was trying to use load shedding as a scapegoat for the system being offline.
“That information is very misleading. The Department of Home Affairs together with Sita (State Information Technology Agency) have not upgraded the network and this is an issue that we have been raising.

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