In an effort to improve the customer service experience while keeping our employees safe, we had to review some of our operational decisions in order to adhere to the COVID-19 regulations. As an essential services company, Eskom will continue to provide a 24-hour service daily for network faults affecting significant areas and also supplies to critical installations, such as hospitals.
The relaxation of the national lockdown restrictions has resulted in increased risk of COVID-19 exposure for our employees. As part of risk management protocols, Eskom will not dispatch technicians for single household fault calls after 16h00, but will do so the next day. Only emergency calls will be attended to on the same day the fault has been reported. Due to a high number of outages as a result of the recent bad weather conditions, we are currently experiencing a high number of calls for service. This has resulted in delayed responses in attending to faults.
While out to repair faults, Eskom employees have also been attacked or attempts to kidnap them made. This is totally unacceptable. The safety of our employees remains our number one priority, and Eskom reserves the right to withdraw its services where the operating environment is deemed unsafe.
