Improving customer services at the Department of Home Affairs.

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to design and implement a customer service model that will assist the Department of Home Affairs (DHA) to improve their levels of service delivery by providing world class customer services. A sample population of 51 managers or senior managers who are students at the University of Kwazulu Natal, Graduate School of Business were interviewed. The respondents were from different companies in both the private and public sectors. The results indicated that there is a strong correlation between client satisfaction and the quality of service provided by DHA. Data was gathered by means of interviews. This made it possible to address specific areas of interest for the study. The interview questions consisted of three areas of focus, namely demographical information, customer service-related issues and DHA service-related issues. The research questions were original as there were no pre-exiting interview questions that met the research criteria. The questions were based on a theoretical foundation. Interviews were conducted on a sample group of 51 respondents and consisted of open-ended questions in order that the respondents were able to fully express themselves when answering the questions. The non-probability sampling technique was used. SPSS was used to analyse the data. The study revealed that DHA has a serious problem with staff inefficiency and many members of staff lacked customer service skills that could help the Department to improve their service quality. The study also revealed that most of the clients had visited the DHA offices to apply for Identity Documents. It is was not clear if those were new documents or first applications, but the study can assume that since these people were adults, the possibility existed that most of them were applying for lost ID documents. The study highlighted the need to improve the levels of service by training staff members, but there is also a need to increase human capacity on counters especially in the sections dealing with ID collection, ID applications and Passports.