The Presidential Hotline will be placed under the Department of Performance, Monitoring, Evaluation and Administration (PMEA), in an attempt to increase its efficiency.
However, the Democratic Alliance (DA) says this move won't help.
PMEA minister Collins Chabane said in his presidency budget vote speech that the president has decided to place the hotline under his office as a performance monitoring and evaluation tool to assess the performance of government against the citizen's needs.
“We are in the process of evaluating its performance and introducing interventions to make it more efficient and respond to the public needs effectively. The information collected by the hotline gives us an indication of whether services are reaching our people and how efficient we are as government,” said Chabane.
DA shadow minister of public service and administration Anchen Dreyer says this won't help the failing call centre. “I think you can move it to any department you want to and it will still not perform if some fundamental changes are not made. It doesn't matter which department it's in.”
She adds that the system will only be successful if the quality of people and the information they harness, via the calls made to the hotline, improve drastically.
Despite several requests to Chabane's office for comment, ITWeb has received no response.
No answer
Dreyer says that despite the modern technology in place at the call centre, efficiency remains poor because information is not processed properly and this is the key to the hotline's problem.
She says a huge volume of calls could be adding to the problems, since there were 232 643 calls made to the hotline by the end of September last year and only 1 168 were resolved. Dreyer notes that the number of calls abandoned between September and February was even greater, at 484 327. Due to this, the number of calls each month is decreasing drastically, according to Dreyer.
She explains that the biggest problem is that calls are directed to the wrong departments and, more importantly, information regarding the calls is not recorded properly, which means the calls can not be followed up or resolved.
“The most important requirements are the management, follow-up and the implementation of solutions and the quality and completeness of information captured on the system when a call is answered, for example, correct ID of caller to follow up, address and location of problem, correct allocation to appropriate sphere of government (provincial government can do nothing about a problem if it does not have the power to intervene at that sphere; for example, Western Cape government can not solve defence force issues).”
In his speech, Chabane also noted the poor performance of the call centre and the government's service delivery in general. “The service delivery protests also highlight our inability to effectively communicate with our people.”
Excuses?
ANC chief whip Mathole Motshekga previously said that, given the high volume of calls, more staff members were needed to ensure all the complaints are attended to.
Pan African Congress president Letlapa Mphahlele agreed, saying the hotline was another way of "healing the nation", but that staff capacity is not where it is supposed to be. “They are working at 50% the capacity of what is really needed," he added.
The State IT Agency (SITA), which was involved in providing the call centre's technology, says the centre's capacity was affected by a tight budget.
SITA chairperson Zodwa Manase says no more work could be done on the call centre, until additional funding became available. "The more capacity we have, the more calls we'll be able to take and the more people will be helped." She said the initial budget was R5 million, and now sits at R10 million.
The hotline, which can be reached on 17737, went live in September last year and operates on two shifts per day with 10 people on each shift. It deals with complaints related to employment, housing, law, citizenship, potable water, social benefits, electricity, education, roads and health.
Share
