The Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) call centre is increasing its staff complement to cope with the growing number of queries ahead of the election next week.
Yaron Assabi, CEO of DigitalMall, which manages the call centre, says the staff complement will be increased to 110 in the next couple of days. Assabi says the number of calls has been climbing steadily, rising to 15 000 yesterday.
"The 120-port VoiceXML/interactive voice response (IVR) platform is currently handling about 80% of the calls, providing users with a confirmation of voting registration as well as other pertinent information in all 11 official languages.
"In January, the VoiceXML solution fielded almost half a million calls, of which 76% were handled by IVR.
"This meant the remaining 23% of calls were handled by call customer relations managers over the January registration period, dropping the CRM call load to just over a third of the total number of calls handled in November. This represented a significant saving in operational costs, and improved call-handling capacity and public convenience," he says.
The call centre was upgraded after the November registrations for elections by a consortium including Grintek Telecom, which provided the technology; DigitalMall; Emmanuels Call Centre Staffing Solutions; and Intelleca Voice & Mobile, which provided the IVR platform.
While Assabi could not provide the value of the deal for the consortium, he says the IEC saw a return on its investment 22 days after the IVR portion of the solution was implemented in December.
He says the call centre will also provide election results as they become available.
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