| Home | Previous page | You are here: ATIO News - Case studies |
PROVIDING THE SINGLE POINT OF CONTACT
As a black empowered ICT solutions and services provider with nearly 20 years experience in delivering customer interaction and contact centres to the South African market,ATIO Corporation has utilised its local knowledge and expertise to meet the unique needs of various levels of government.
Government’s commitment to service excellence
Endless queues and long delays make dealing with government a frustrating and dispiriting experience. As a result, the South African Government introduced Batho Pele (‘People First’), aiming to transform public service delivery through a citizen-centric approach. It looks to provide quality standards for public service, deliver access to these services and accurate information regarding them, promote courtesy and consultation, and ultimately provide facilities that will remedy mistakes or failures swiftly.
As part of this vision, the South African government has put an e-government strategy in place that will leverage ICT to deliver public services. Centred on the construction of web portals, it is aimed at delivering information around the lifeepisodes of citizens from cradle to grave. However, with less than 10% of South Africans having access to online facilities, the e-government strategies of national and provincial government have had to be supplemented by other technologies – most notably, the humble telephone.
“A viable contact centre is a vital ingredient in any e-government strategy, as the telephone is still the most accessible and pervasive means of communication for over 90% of our citizenry,” points out Jean Sinovich, Project Director, ATIO IBS Division. “As a black empowered ICT solutions and services provider, ATIO Corporation has been delivering customer interaction and contact centres to the South African market for nearly two decades. By combining our local knowledge with expertise in leading global technologies, we have become the acknowledged experts in the field, developing a proud reputation for delivering on time, within budget and to specification.”
Connecting the Gauteng Provincial Government
One leading implementation has been for the Gauteng Provincial Government (GPG). A functional audit in the late 1990s found that many of the GPG’s support service resources were duplicated across departments, leading to less than optimal service delivery. The solution was to create the Gauteng Shared Service Centre (GSSC), a single support service unit that would provide centralised core services such as finance, human resources, procurement, internal auditing and technology support services. At this time, the GPG’s e-government strategy called for a single point of contact for all its stakeholders – from citizens to businesses, tourists, as well as its own employees. The GSSC was mandated to implement this in the form of a web portal, supported by a dedicated contact centre. In January 2004, as part of a three year project, ATIO Corporation was chosen to head up a consortium that would build the contact centre, facilitate training and the transfer of skills to GSSC employees, and ultimately hand back a fully-functional and sustainable contact centre by 2007.
Delivering an integrated platform
The ATIO Consortium took over the existing contact centre of nearly 50 seats at the beginning of March 2004, and immediately began increasing its scope. This involved installing a new technology platform utilising Interactive Intelligence’s Customer Interactive Centre (CIC) product. CIC is an open software platform that includes functionality such as universal queuing, IVR, CRM integration, as well as performance monitoring and management tools – all supplied within a single box that integrates seamlessly within an IP environment.
The new contact centre went live towards the end of March, and was immediately handling over 25,000 calls a month relating to internal GSSC functions such as Finance, Procurement and HR enquiries or IT assistance. The next step involved rolling out more specific services to other departments. One of the first was taking on the Department of Transport’s bookings for learners and drivers licenses for all the Gauteng Metros except Ekurhuleni.
This additional demand of more than 100,000 calls per month is expected to jump another 20-30% once Ekurhuleni comes onboard, with the result that the contact centre will expand. “This is just the tip of the iceberg,” says Sinovich. “A multitude of services from the GPG's 12 departments will in time be rolled out – spearheaded by the GSSC executive, together with the e-Government Strategy team and ATIO Consortium – embarking on road-shows with each department to highlight the benefits of the new, shared service as an integral part of the GPG’s e-Government strategy. This will be followed up with detailed workshops to identify the types of services that can potentially be rolled out, and place a priority on them.” Removing administrative backlogs
Another success story has come from The Western Cape Education Department (WCED), which manages 1,460 schools, 28,500 teachers and 8,000 civil servants. As the largest employer in the provincial government, with employees in nearly every town and village in the province, the departmental head office in Cape Town deals directly with teachers and school administrators on issues relating to appointments, pay and benefits.
Towards the end of 2003, the WCED identified the problem that back-office staff in the HR department was dealing with some 20,000 calls a month, many related to routine queries around appointments and salary payments. This took time away from necessary administrative tasks, leading to backlogs and poor customer service. The decision was taken to implement a dedicated in-house contact centre, and ATIOCorporation, in partnership with the Dialogue Group, was awarded the contract in early February 2004.
A scalable solution
The complete contact centre solution, which works with the department’s existing ISDX PABX, included all the necessary hardware including PCs, headsets, telephones and wall displays. ATIO Corporation’s Cybercall solution provided for realtime 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.”
“On installation, completed in March 2004, the contact centre was immediately swamped with calls,” says Paddy Attwell, WCED Communications Director. “Fortunately we had 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.” And the WCED has notched up some early successes. Backlogs in the back-office have been cleared and processing times have reduced. This in turn has led to increased efficiency, evidenced by the number of calls dropping substantially from 1,500 to around 800 a day.
Delivering proactive intelligence
The WCED also uses the statistics generated by the ATIO Cybercall system not only to improve call centre performance, but also management throughout the organisation. The ability to classify calls according to their subject matter, for example, has helped the WCED identify the most common concerns raised, and implement proactive solutions. And since many calls are made simply because there is no other access to important information, the WCED is also considering producing fact sheets or online resources to provide information which is most often requested at the contact centre.
“The bottom line for any governmental organisation is that by incorporating an effective contact centre within its e-strategies, it will not only serve the majority of its stakeholders better, but also benefit from improvements in back-office processes,” concludes Sinovich. “With our leading edge solutions and local expertise, we look forward to delivering to other areas of government the sort of benefits that have made ATIO Corporation the local standard in contact centre solutions.“
|
|
