The City of Windhoek's call center is now operating 24 hours a day to assist all of the residents in need of their help.

The call center is located in the capital's southern industries, and each shift has seven agents who answer 500 to 1000 calls per day.

Residents can report incidents via SMS, e-mail, Facebook, and, very soon, WhatsApp.

The call center agents can also provide clients with reference numbers so that they can follow up.

"At the moment, we have manual reference numbers, but the current system that we recently launched can provide reference numbers to the client, and then the client can use that to follow up when they are calling us," said Linda Shininge, the section head at the Customer Center, adding that "These are channels we currently have within our space, so we handle telephonically. WhatsApp will be rolled out soon; we are excited. Clients will be able to send through pictures of incidents, and we will have a specific individual working on WhatsApp just to provide feedback."

Road accidents and water leakage are common cases being reported to the call center.

"One thing I must mention is that when we took over the call center in 2019 when you reported a water leak, it could take 4 to 7 days to be fixed, but today it is fixed within a day, sometimes within an hour. So I must really say that there has been a significant improvement. Those that take longer are those where parts cannot be found and other things that are out of our control. But we have an individual that follows up with the customer to find out if the pipes have been fixed or things like that. So, we're fine from start to finish."