Qatar General Elec-tricity and Water Corporation (Kahramaa) yesterday said it will stop accepting payment of water and electricity bills at its customer service centres beginning April 1. Customers can now pay bills through Kahramaa’s website (km.qa), its call centre (991), Ooredoo and Qatar National Bank self-service machines, and other banks. Bills can be paid from outside Qatar as well. Kahramaa plans to stop issuing paper bills from the said date. “We, in fact, launched the project on January 1, but we set a deadline for April 1 — no more paper bills after that,” Eng. Abdulla Ali Al Theyab, Manager of Quality and Continual Improvement Department at Kahramaa, said yesterday. He was speaking at a press conference that saw the launch of a series of electronic services that aim to make Kahramaa a “paperless corporation”. Last week, Kahramaa, which serves some 290,000 customers in Qatar, closed down its service centres at the Post Office and City Center. “These centres were only for bill payment, and since we have transferred to five other electronic options for bill payment, we closed them on February 17,” Al Theyab said, adding that six other big service centres were still fully functional. The corporation launched an iPhone application yesterday which provides access to a number of services in Arabic and English, including payment of bills. The system of printing paper bills and delivering them by post was costly and time-consuming, Al Theyab said. “Some customers also complained that they do not receive the bills by post. Ultimately, we decided to go green,” he said. Among the main e-services is an electronic system for tracking the status of applications. “Using Service Tracking, customers can track building permits, connections and meter installation, applied for via the customer services registration number,” Al Theyab said. A new project has been launched to provide water and electricity connections to new buildings and those under construction without delay. The IT department at Kahramaa has also introduced a service through which customers will be able to check their bills, building permits and service connections through a ‘SMS Solution’. A customer satisfaction survey conducted by Kahramaa has revealed that satisfaction levels for the call centre’s services were higher than those for the services centres. THE PENINSULA

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