adminBlessings Chidakwa
Municipal Reporter
At least 164 000 mobile numbers and 40 000 emails have been registered for Harare City Council’s electronic billing system against 300 000 properties in the city’s data base, acting revenue manager Mr Alfred Guni has said.
Mr Guni said thee-billing platform is a system that allows City of Harare to send e-statements to residents via their emails and mobile numbers.
“Beginning of March, we started sending e-statements to customers and we started a massive customer harvesting exercise to harvest customer information. We have to date harvested 40 000 emails which is an increase the 33 000 that we started with at the beginning of March.
“We have also harvested 164 000 mobile numbers which we intend to use to send billing information to customers via their mobile numbers.”
Mr Guni said the city has about 300 000 properties registered in its database, showing that out of 40 000 emails registered so far there were about 260 000 still to register.
He said while there was an upward trend of 164 000 for mobile billing, the platform had a challenge in that the amount of information that could be shared was limited.
“With email billing, we can share a whole bill maybe for three months or two years, but mobile billing it is just a text to inform a customer that your outstanding balance is this amount,” said Mr Guni.
He said while the platform allowed the city to send customer billing information via email and mobile numbers, the city was not running away from the traditional physical bill delivery.
Mr Guni said they were running the two parallel processes together, although going forward they intended to eliminate the physical bill delivery processes, especially for commercial properties.
He urged ratepayers to participate in the customer harvesting information by sending in their details to the city’s website.
“This is a good platform for us to share customer information, to communicate with you, we are going to use this information that you provide not just for billing purposes, you will find that as you go into the future we will announce budgetary information through these customer details,” said Mr Guni.
“We intend to make sure there is constant engagements between City of Harare and its residents. So, the information is very important to us and to the residents to receive constant information from us.”
Mr Guni said the details should be relating to the account number, mobile number, email addresses and also ratepayers are allowed to multiple email addresses and mobile numbers.
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