As the country celebrates a record customer satisfaction score, councils report a near-28 negative recommendation rating and public hospitals fail patients at every turn. A new national survey asks: who is this progress actually for?
Ten years of measurement. Fifteen thousand voices. Twenty-five sectors assessed across every province of Zimbabwe. And yet, at the heart of the 2025 Zimbabwe National Customer Satisfaction Index, recently launched by the Chartered Institute of Customer Management (CICM) and the Customer Experience Association of Zimbabwe (CXAZ), lies an uncomfortable truth that no headline figure can obscure: the institutions that Zimbabweans cannot avoid are the ones failing them most catastrophically.
The national NCSI score rose to 67.5%, its highest in the survey's ten-year history, up from 66% in 2024, and 15.5 percentage points above the Sub-Saharan Africa average. But strip away the private-sector stars, the hotels, the safari operators, the mobile payment platforms and what remains is a public sector operating in a state of sustained institutional failure, unchanged year after year, survey after survey.
Councils at the Bottom.....Again
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Local Authorities recorded 44% CSI the lowest score of all 25 sectors with a Net Promoter Score of negative 28. In practical terms: for every resident who would recommend their local council, nearly two would actively warn others away. Water rationing continues in 7 of 10 major urban centres. Refuse collection runs below the weekly minimum standard in 64% of suburbs. Budget transparency compliance sits at just 42% of councils. Complaint resolution the most basic test of any institution -- stands at under 28%, meaning nearly three in four registered complaints are simply logged and never resolved.
The report does not mince words: "Local Authorities require urgent institutional reform, including revenue collection enforcement, professionalised management structures, and national performance accountability frameworks with consequences for persistent failure." The expectation-quality gap has sat unmoved at 26 percentage points for three consecutive years -- a number that speaks less to incremental decline and more to structural indifference.
"The complaint resolution rate is under 28%. Most complaints are logged and never actioned." -- NCSI 2025
Hospitals: A Patient Safety Emergency, Not a Customer Service Problem
If Local Authorities represent civic failure, the Hospitals and Clinics sector represents something far graver. At 52% CSI, with a negative NPS of minus 5 and the widest expectation-quality gap in the entire survey, 50 percentage points, the public health system is, in the report's own language, experiencing "a patient safety emergency." Nurse-to-patient ratios stand at 1:28 against the WHO-recommended 1:8. Medication is unavailable at 43% of public hospital visits. Emergency response times average 4.2 hours. Maternal mortality remains at 462 per 100,000 live births, three times the SADC average. Over 4,200 nurses and 890 doctors left the country in 2024 and 2025 alone.
The private-public divide is stark: private hospitals average 71% CSI while public hospitals average 41%. That 30-point gulf is not a management gap. It is a resource gap, a governance gap, and for the majority of Zimbabweans who cannot afford private care, a matter of life and death. The report records that 64% of Zimbabweans have no formal medical cover, and that average family medical aid premiums now consume 18% of median household income for those who do.
Regulatory Authorities and Public Service Agencies fared little better, scoring 50% CSI with a perceived quality rating of just 34 out of 100, the lowest of any sector measured. Licence or service application or processing averages six weeks against a published ten-day standard. Informal payment demands corruption, in plain English, were reported at 38% of public service points. Disability access at government buildings was rated inadequate at 81% of facilities. Service hours restricted to 08:00-16:00 effectively exclude working citizens entirely.
The Headline Hides the Harm
The 67.5% national score is real, and it is driven by genuine excellence in mobile financial services (79%), tour operations (84%), hospitality (89%), and courier logistics (81%). These sectors, all private and all subject to competitive pressure, have improved dramatically over five years. But their stellar numbers do mathematical work in the national average that public institutions do not deserve to shelter behind.
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The 45-percentage-point gap between Hotels and Lodges (89%) and Local Authorities (44%) is the widest in the NCSI's ten-year history. The report describes it as "not a statistical artefact" but "a lived reality for Zimbabwean citizens who experience world-class mobile payment services and life-threatening healthcare delivery in the same week." Five sectors remain below the critical 60% floor. Three of the bottom five, Hospitals, Regulatory Agencies, and Local Authorities, record negative Net Promoter Scores. They are not merely underperforming. Their customers are actively telling others to avoid them.
The CICM Executive Director, Dr Rinos Mautsa, closes the foreword with a statement aimed squarely at those in power: "The question for every CEO, every Minister, every regulator, and every board member reading this report is not whether Zimbabwe can achieve these standards across all sectors. The question is whether its institutions will choose to."
After a decade of asking that question, the answer from Zimbabwe's public institutions has been, overwhelmingly, silence.
