GovChat keeps 50m citizens connected


Johannesburg, 08 Jan 2020
Naseem Ahmed, Synthesis Project Leader
Naseem Ahmed, Synthesis Project Leader

GovChat will soon officially launch its tailored technology platform that will enable millions of citizens to communicate with all arms of the South African government. GovChat has been appointed as the official citizen engagement platform for such purpose. The platform will enable citizens to inter alia, report and rate government service delivery, record service faults and weaknesses and enable service providers, civil servants and ward councillors, et al, to track such claims and complaints and follow up on remedial actions.

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Approximately two months ago, Synthesis commenced the development of this compelling platform on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Using highly scalable services from AWS ensures the platform will meet the expected demand and growth in adoption, enabling the country’s 50 million citizens to extract maximum benefits and satisfaction through its use.

The challenge

The GovChat vision was to create a cloud-based, chatbot-assisted platform that would cater for multiple communication channels for government, its citizens and for broader society, but without the development skills and capacity, GovChat sought qualified partners to appreciate the value and agree to build the complex and hi-tech application.

In May 2019, GovChat not only received R20 million in funding from Capital Appreciation (Capprec), but Synthesis, a highly respected software house and a subsidiary of Capprec, was assigned to design, and develop the required systems and technology applications. To drive the growth and impact, the GovChat team wanted to build out the functionality and leverage the most advanced technologies, through the use of “cloud” and machine learning, in order to make its services more user friendly, easily accessible and functionally resilient, in anticipation of a growing user base.

Synthesis happens to be the first company in the Middle East and Africa to achieve accreditation from Amazon Web Services and remain the highest ranked AWS provider in South Africa and the region. “We were delighted that Synthesis was willing and able to help GovChat fulfil its vision,” explains GovChat founder and CEO Eldrid Jordaan.

Synthesis was accordingly commissioned and its mandate was to design and build a cloud-based platform that offered chatbot-driven capabilities to capture and report on citizen-reported issues. An additional requirement was to create a management portal for municipalities to view details on logged service requests and to be enabled to track and manage these citizen requests from initiation to closure.

For obvious reasons, the platform needs to apply the use of geo-coordinates (location services) to record the exact location and source of the service requests that are being logged. This requires an accurate overlay of all government facilities on an interactive map, so that government/municipal officials are able to view areas of recorded high levels of citizen interactions and activity.

The solution

Synthesis has accordingly built a chatbot driven by natural language interactions, leveraging deep cloud expertise on AWS and powered by machine learning. The chatbot guides the user seamlessly through the communication process, from selecting the nature of the query through to flagging the issue by dropping a pin on a digital map.

Naseem Ahmed, the Synthesis Project Leader, records: “The Synthesis team used AWS’s agile progression methodologies and cloud provisioning to produce the solution. We simultaneously ran development, test and production environments using cloud computing capabilities. This allowed us to quickly move from “idea” to “minimum viable product” and get a first functioning iteration of the platform within the tight deadline.”

Ahmed further explains: “The GovChat service needs to cater for all citizens – people with different levels of literacy and language proficiency and who will use mobile devices of varying sophistication. Synthesis designed a chatbot that will provide a consistent and simple interaction experience across a variety of communication channels.”

From a technical viewpoint, the Chatbot architecture is designed to cope with high volumes of usage, minimising operating costs, but able to handle functional variance across different end-user devices. The Synthesis team is on track to meet the tight deadlines set by GovChat and its stakeholders for the development and early implementation of the solution.

 The benefits

The GovChat citizen reporting solution is currently in pilot at two South African municipalities and will likely go live nationally early in 2020. The municipality management portal, which will include workflow reporting functionality, is already in development and a live version of the technology will also be enabled during 2020.

Jordaan says: “What Synthesis’ brilliant tech team has achieved is quite incredible, they have taken our GovChat vision and made it tangible. Synthesis took the idea, ran with it and what they have achieved is simply amazing. You don’t find that kind of diligence and commitment that often.”

“Synthesis is proud to be part of this important initiative. We look forward to helping GovChat achieve its exciting objectives in 2020 as more municipalities subscribe to the portal,” says Ahmed.

GovChat is in the process of establishing additional access agreements with various social media platforms (Facebook messenger, Telegram, etc). These channels will become available for GovChat citizen reporting in due course.

For more information, go to https://www.synthesis.co.za.

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Synthesis

Synthesis offers cloud consulting, regulatory reporting, and emerging technology solutions to banking and financial institutions, retail, media, and telecommunications sectors in South Africa and other emerging markets. Synthesis is a true South African success story, with JSE-listed Fintech company, Capital Appreciation Limited, having acquired 100 per cent of the company in 2017. Following the acquisition Synthesis remains an independent operating entity within the Capital Appreciation Group. Visit www.synthesis.co.za or follow on LinkedIn.

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