Utility companies in the Eastern Region have been urged to improve upon their quality of services to satisfy their consumers and reduce the high number of complaints against them.
According to the Eastern Regional Manager of the Public Utilities Regulatory Commission (PURC), Mr Jude Aduamoah-Addo, his outfit had received 2, 044 complaints last year, out of which 1,738 were in relations to poor quality of service.
“Looking at this huge number of complaints in relation to poor quality of service, I can confidently say that a lot of customers of the utility companies are not happy with the poor quality of services and hence both Electricity and Water companies must improve upon their services to satisfy their customers,” he said.
Mr Aduamoah-Addo made these statements in an interview with the Ghanaian Times on Monday.
He explained further that considering the 1, 738 issue of poor quality of service complaints received, power outages constituted 782; face offs, 90 ; no water flow, 136 and burst pipe 82, adding that these constituted majority of the complaints.
Mr Aduamoah-Addo enumerated the rest of the complaints as low voltage, overloaded transformers, water leakages, impurities in water.
For these reasons, he stated that there was the need for both utility companies to improve their network and services to stabilise service delivery to customers, adding that by so doing customers would be happy about their services and the number of complaints would be reduced.
The Eastern Regional Manager of the PURC revealed that out of the 1, 738 poor quality of services received, 1, 735 had been resolved, saying that out of a total of 2, 044 complaints received, the Commission was able to resolve 2, 039.
He added that for their part as the regulatory body, they would intensify education to enable the public to be aware of their existence and be able to report their complaints to the PURC for them to be resolved.
The regional manager also revealed that through public education “customers received billing adjustments and out of GH¢26, 629. 03 that was disputed, an amount of G H¢16, 008.28 was recovered for 15 customers leaving a total of GH¢10, 620.74.”
He noted that the PURC has identified public education to be one of the best strategies to resolve customers’ grievances and hence assured that his outfit would continue to adopt it to enable them reach out to remote communities “especially those we have not visited before so that we do public education there.”
Mr Aduamoah-Addo stated at the end, the PURC hoped to understand the challenges that consumers face in the remote areas and help them to resolve them.
The Public Relations and External Affairs Officer, Mr Emmanuel Agbesi Foli, stated that in order to continue to resolve a lot of issues in relation to utilities, there was the need for customers to come out and report their grievances.
He said many times, most people did not report, and urged the public not to keep their grievances to themselves, but to report to the PURC for redress.
FROM AMA TEKYIWAA AMPADU AGYEMAN, KOFORIDUA
