Design of a Digital Complaints Management System for a Water Corporation in Osun State

Customers of water corporations in Osun State frequently experience unresolved service complaints due to the absence of structured complaint tracking and resolution workflows. This study presents the design and implementation of a digital complaints management system for a water corporation in Osun State, South West Nigeria. The system was built using PHP, MySQL, and a Bootstrap-based responsive interface. Customers submit complaints via web form or SMS, receive unique reference numbers, and track resolution progress through a self-service portal. Internal workflows route complaints to field operations teams based on complaint type and location, with escalation rules for unresolved complaints exceeding defined SLA durations. Supervisory dashboards provide complaint trend analytics and team performance metrics. Development used the Waterfall model with a dedicated two-week testing phase. Functional testing of 80 test cases achieved 97 percent pass rate. User acceptance testing was conducted with 30 customer service staff and 50 customer volunteers over two weeks. Post-testing surveys showed 82 percent staff satisfaction and 79 percent customer satisfaction. Average complaint resolution time decreased from 11.4 days (manual process estimate from records) to 3.8 days during the UAT pilot period. The study recommends that the Osun State Water Corporation formally adopt the system and integrate it with the corporation's existing billing platform to enable direct account-linked complaint submission.

Keywords: complaints management, water corporation, Osun State, customer service, web application