Abstract
The study examines customers’ expectations, perceptions and level of satisfaction with water service provision in the City of Johannesburg municipality. The study also assessed level of customers’ knowledge and awareness with regards to water services provision as well as their, involvement in municipality’s service delivery planning processes.
Using the mixed method approach, i.e. quantitative and qualitative methods, data was collected from residents of three of the City of Johannesburg regions as well as from government officials. The sample size consisted of 161 respondents and six participants for the quantitative and qualitative approaches respectively. A questionnaire adapted from SERVQUAL instrument was used to collect the quantitative data while an interview protocol was used to collect qualitative data. Descriptive and inferential (Pearson correlation and T-test) statistics were the main statistic tool used for analysing the quantitative data while thematic analysis was used to analyse the qualitative data.
The results of the qualitative study show that in relation to the planning process for water services provision, there is felt need to involve customers more. The findings showed that the City of Johannesburg does not strictly follow the prescriptions of Water Services Act in developing Water Services Development Plans (WSDP) more so when it comes to customer participation. It was also revealed that the WSDPs are sometimes approved by Council without adequate public contribution and Department of Water and Sanitation (DWS) comments.
The quantitative findings show that customers were generally satisfied in water services provision. However, the results also show that customer expectations on water services quality exceed perceptions in all three regions under study, indicating a service quality gap. The differences between expectations and perceptions were found to be statistically significant. Furthermore, results showed no strong evidence of expectations being related to participation in municipality’s service delivery processes. Perceptions were however found to be largely related to participation. No evidence was found of strong relationship between overall satisfaction and expectations. Perceptions were however found to be strongly related to overall satisfaction. In addition customers’ knowledge on water service provision was found not to be strongly related to perceptions.
Increased efforts aimed at gathering customers’ views are recommended as it is likely to help ensure that management decisions are based on better informed positions that are linked to...
M.Com. (Business Management)