The South African Revenue Services (SARS) has signed a R100 million, 18-month deal with the ACDT consortium, for the delivery of three regional contact centres. ACDT consists of Accenture, Choice Technologies, Dimension Data and Tsohle Systems Integrators.
SARS says the deployment, located in Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal and the Western Cape, will handle all national calls and aims to help SARS increase service delivery and efficiency. The body is "the country`s first department to implement a call centre with fully integrated fax, telephone and Internet capabilities", according to Andile Pama, GM of Taxpayer Service.
Accenture SA associate director Jan Bouwer says the project expands on SARS`s current pilot by the same consortium in Cape Town, which has 140 seats and handles 3 500 to 5 000 calls daily. The Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal call centres will help manage incoming calls and support taxpayer and revenue collection campaigns. The Gauteng centre will focus on tax collections.
Aside from productivity gains and cost cuts to service delivery, compliance with tax laws will also be improved through outbound campaigns to follow up on late or missing tax returns, SARS says.
One view of the taxpayer
SARS employees will have access to integrated taxpayer information, enabling them to resolve queries more quickly, and reducing the number of calls taxpayers need to make for assistance.
The Western Cape call centre will be scaled up and standardised technology and additional seats will be implemented in KwaZulu-Natal. All national incoming calls will be routed to one of these, comprising a total of 500 seats, via a national number.
Bouwer says thanks to the tools available, call centre agents will be able to resolve most queries on the spot. More complex questions will be routed via the Siebel customer management system to other staff.
In terms of outbound capabilities, Bouwer says: "The Genesys and Siebel systems provide customer relationship management, workflow management and predictive dialling to simplify call centre agents` tasks, allowing them to read and follow instructions on a computer screen, and capture the interaction electronically."
Accenture, the prime contractor, provides project management, Siebel configuration, business requirements definition, process design and training skills. Choice Technologies, a majority black-owned networking company, will provide process mapping skills, systems and integration testing, and assistance with development of a Siebel implementation roadmap.
Tsohle Systems Integrators will perform systems engineering, systems and integration testing and maintenance and support components. Dimension Data will provide business requirement and process mapping, contact centre integration, installation of Nice Voice Loggers and contact centre training.
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