WESTERN CAPE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT
Industry: Government department responsible for education in schools and Further Education and Training (FET) colleges in the Western Cape

Key Solutions: Cybercall call centre solution, Dictaphone Freedom voice recording system, Plantronic headsets and keypads, Desktop PCs and other necessary hardware.

Background

The Western Cape Education Department (WCED) is responsible for education in about 1,460 schools and six FET colleges in the Western Cape. The department employs about 28,500 teachers and 8,000 public servants. It is the largest employer in the provincial government, with employees in nearly every town and village in the province.

The WCED has three distinct client groups. The first two, learners and parents, interact with the education system mainly through schools and to some extent through seven district-level Education Management and Development Centres. The third group consists of teachers and school administrators, who deal directly with the departmental head office in Cape Town on human resource (HR) management issues, such as salaries and service benefits.

Business Issue

In recent years, staff in the WCED's personnel management directorates took up to 20,000 calls a month from teachers and school principals on routine HR issues. This took time away from administration, resulting in backlogs and an inconsistent customer service.

Solution

Working with the (Contact Centre Associates), a member of the Dialogue Group of Companies and the provincial government's Organisational Design Unit, the WCED decided that a dedicated in-house call centre was the most appropriate and cost-effective way to deal with the problem. A tender was issued in January 2004 calling for a complete call centre solution for 15 agents and one manager, which would be able to work with the department's existing ISDX PABX. The solution needed to include all the necessary hardware including PCs, headsets, telephones and wall displays. Software requirements were for real-time monitoring and reporting tools, voice mail and voice prompts including an interactive voice response (IVR) system, a mechanism for routing calls to an overflow group during busy periods and a caller identification system.

The department's Safe Schools Call Centre, which has been operating since 2001, was amalgamated with the project (although it is housed in a separate room for confidentiality reasons). Safe Schools is a hotline for learners, educators and parents to report school crime, violence and incidents of abuse. It provides some online debriefing or counselling, as well as serving as a co-ordinating centre for referrals and information dissemination.

ATIO, in partnership with Contact Centre Associates, which also operates the provincial government's Cape Gateway call centre, was awarded the contract in early February 2004 and was able to complete installation by March 31, with the first calls being received on April 1.

Result

"We were swamped with calls from the start," says the department's communications director Paddy Attwell. "We'd identified 160 internal lines that were getting calls appropriate to the call centre, and routed 30 of them to the centre initially, as well as advertising the number.

We got around 20,000 calls in the first month, more than we had anticipated. Fortunately we'd trained a large team and built the system for scalability, so we were able to expand very quickly, without encountering any hardware or software issues."

Attwell acknowledges that the initial learning curve was steep: "
We received a lot of complaints at first, because callers wanted to contact HR staff directly, and because of long initial holding times. However, our Call Centre team soon got on top of the system and began delivering an excellent service. We are now receiving compliments."

The main objective was to improve client service. An important spin-off for the WCED was to improve operational efficiencies, by freeing time for HR staff to attend to routine administration. The department has noticed some early successes. For example, by routing calls to the Call Centre, HR staff found it easier to complete administration involved in mid-year appointments in good time.

One effect of this increased efficiency is that the number of calls received has dropped substantially since the call centre was opened. "When we started we were getting 1,500 calls a day," says Attwell. "By July the number was down to around 800".

The department uses the statistics generated by the Cybercall system not only to improve call centre performance, but also to improve management throughout the organisation. The ability to classify calls according to their subject matter, for example, has helped the Department identify the most common concerns raised.

Statistics have shown, for example, that new appointments and delays in processing new salaries are key concerns. Now that we can pinpoint the problems we're in a much better position to solve them; it's helped to focus our minds."

The department is also considering producing fact sheets and online resources to provide information which is often requested of the call centre. "Many of the calls are made because people have no other access to important information," says Atwell. "Now that we're able to identify the most-requested information, we can improve our service by making it more accessible from the start.

Attwell notes that the physical process of implementing the call centre has been painless. "ATIO did very well to get the project up and running so quickly, and they haven't missed a beat since. Often they're able to provide good advice on issues we might not have picked up without their expertise. They're definitely a partner rather than just a supplier."