The Electoral Commission (EC) call centre dealt with as many as 55 000 calls per day during the final days of voter registration this week.
The call centre, which was contracted out to Grintek Telecom and DigitalMall in partnership with Intelleca Voice & Mobile and Emanuel`s Staffing Solutions, has handled 1 030 000 calls since it was launched on 1 October.
At the end of December, a voice automation product called VoiceGenie was implemented to cope with unprecedented call volumes. This added 120 automated ports to the existing 110 call centre agents staffing the call centre.
"We performed a world first and launched the system in eight days," says Yaron Assabi, DigitalMall CEO. "We also recorded 20 000 audio prompts working with Intellica and that went really well."
Mike Renzon, MD of Intellica Voice & Mobile, explains that the flexibility of the VoiceGenie technology allowed the company to complete "a very complicated project" in the eight-day period. "This is the first government-related project to use voice XML technology," he says. "We believe that because of the flexibility of the technology and the ability to access it using a telephone, this will open up innovative ways for government to canvass people and get views on certain aspects of policy within a relatively short space of time."
The EC predicts that the call centre is going to go to similar levels during voting as it did during registration. "There will be complaints and a lot of panic calls from people who think that they might not be able to vote," says Assabi. "We will have to retrain all the call centre agents on the new FAQs. One thing that`s really nice about the system is that we answer queries in all 11 official languages. One of the resulting difficulties is making sure we have the right skills set in the caller`s language of choice."
So far, the system seems to be coping with the call load. "Anything to do with voting will result in high call volumes," says Renzon. "As far as I know the EC thought the system scaled and performed very well under load on a daily basis."
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