SITA Service Management Centre supports the 2011 local government elections

The State Information Technology Agency (SITA) Service Management Centre (SMC) has a customer-orientated and services focused approach in running its service management services and business process outsourcing (BPO) services, which contributes toward becoming more competitive in its strategy.

The Service Centre capability has been expanded so that points of presence are in all nine provinces of South Africa, with similar rollout capability for BPO services. This enables the SITA SMC to provide a very valuable service to SITA customers within all three spheres of government.

SITA provides Independent Electoral Commission Call Centre

In October 2008, SITA was awarded a multimillion-rand tender – a first for SITA – to operate the call service centre for the 2009 national elections as well as the 2011 local government elections, on behalf of the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC). Winning the tender to run the IEC’s Call Centre on the open market reinforced the SMC’s conscious decision taken to invest in the people, process and world-class technology in the preceding years.

The SMC decided to take on the monumental task of ensuring the citizens’ calls and queries prior to the elections – on the different registration weekends as well as during the election days – would be addressed and managed efficiently. In terms of the contract between SITA and the IEC, SITA set out to host and operate the multi-language call centre at its offices in Centurion.

Beare Ramlal, general manager of the SMC, stated that SITA was well-positioned to win the tender, as the company already had the technology infrastructure in place. In 2005, SITA established the service centre as part of the government’s service delivery platform and therefore could cost-effectively upscale the capacity to fit the needs of the IEC. The IEC had all the benefits of economies of scale from a multimillion-rand call centre platform.

On the back of the success of the call centre for the IEC, SITA launched the Presidential Hotline service.

150 job opportunities

Although the service level agreement specified 120 call centre agents for the local government elections, the SMC had to contract 150 agents, working in different shifts, to assure compliance with the Labour Relations Act regarding maximum hours shift workers are allowed to work.

The minimum criteria for applicants were a Matric pass (Grade 12) with either maths or geography as subjects. The applicants then had to write two exams set out by the IEC, and achieve a pass mark of 80% in order to be accredited as call centre agents.

Due to the high standard set by the IEC, the SMC had to interview more than 400 candidates before they ended up with the final 150 call centre agents who had the required level of skill.

In contracting the agents, it was necessary to take into account the projected demand for each of the 11 different languages.

Positive review

Finweek reporter Ilse Opperman conducted an independent call centre service review by evaluating the performance of the SITA Call Centre for the IEC for the 2008 national elections.

She scored the service as follows:

Time taken to answer: 3 seconds

First impression: 4/5

Ability to answer query: 5/5

Courtesy of agent: 4.5/5

Overall score: 4.9/5

(Published in Finweek, 27 November 2008)

For more information on how the SITA Service Management Centre can help your business, contact the SITA Customer Contact Centre on 0800 SITA Cares (748 222)
or visit: www.sita.co.za