GOVERNMENT
OF INDIA
A Digital India Initiative
GOVERNMENT
OF INDIA
Surat Municipal Corporation (SMC) is responsible to deliver large gamut of infrastructure and services that touches the day-to-day needs of the citizens such as roads, street lighting, water supply and sanitation, solid waste management, primary education, parks, public health, and so on. It touches the life of all the strata of society, SMC is required to orient its activities towards the satisfaction of citizens in the city so as to build confidence among the citizens.
To this end, SMC has identified grievance redressal as an important function for an efficient, responsive and transparent municipal functioning. The basic purpose behind a grievance redressal mechanism is to provide a platform to the citizens to lodge their complaints related to various services they receive from SMC, voice their opinions and provide feedback on various services rendered by ULBs.
One of the very important aspect to make any complaint management system successful is to provide easy avenues for the citizens to register their grievances. SMC has augmented and introduced various popular communication channels from time-to-time. It is ensured that the system is accessible to all sections of the society and does not create technology or financial hindrance.
Instead of relying on citizens to lodge complaints, SMC has taken various steps to identify the complaints proactively. The Command & Control Center [Smart City Center (SMAC Center)] helps to identify the complaints.
All these efforts help SMC to identify the issues proactively and leads to timely compliance of the same.
With a view to ensure timely compliance, complaint escalation is incorporated in the system.
The complaints are first assigned at Level-1 employee, if the complaint remains non-complied within the compliance duration, the complaint is assigned to Level-2 officer and if it remains non-complied even after 24 hours it is escalated to Level-3 officer.
For each escalation, the citizen is notified that the complaint is escalated and the contact details of the concerned officer at respective level are also shared with the citizens.
To make sure that the complaints are compiled properly and to the satisfaction of the citizen, provision to reopen complaint is made. Once the complaint is complied, an SMS is sent to the complainant intimating about the compliance. The citizen is also intimated to reopen the complaint if s/he is not satisfied with the compliance.
The complaint can be reopened within 48 hours of compliance. Reopened complaints are directly assigned to Level-2 officer. On compliance of such reopened complaint again the citizen is notified and he is given option to again reopen the complaint if not satisfied. Such reopened complaints are assigned to Level-3 officers.
Considering the different types of employees working for different domains like health, engineering and administration within SMC and their level of computer knowledge, it is very important to provide and easy user interface.
The web-based application provides the dashboard quickly providing insights on the pending complaints. It also provides details like source wise complaints, escalation details, etc.
SMC has launched SMC Employee Connect Mobile App (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=in.smc.ec). The app enables the assignee employee/officer to keep check on the complaints assigned to him/her. It enables them to check pending complaints, escalated complaints, and reopened complaints. It enables them to mark the compliance from the field. If complaints are not pertaining to them, they can assign/transfer to the concerned employee.
The assignee officer is notified through SMS and push notification as and when the complaint is registered by the citizen. He is also notified when the complaint is escalated.
This app has been very useful to the employees and has also improved the overall response time and reduce the compliance duration.
Prior to this app, employees were required to rely on the SMS notification which was having limited information. The compliance was not on-the spot as the same required to have access the web-based application within the intranet.
The data received from the Complaint Management System helps to generate various insights that helps to identify and correlate the performance or citizen satisfaction w.r.t. particular ward/area, service, employee, seasonality, etc. Some of the data insights are as under:
