IEC elects SITA

By Alex Kayle for SITA
Johannesburg, 03 Dec 2008

The State IT Agency (SITA) has been awarded a tender to operate a contact centre for the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC), in the run up to and during next year's general and provincial elections.

In terms of the contract, SITA will host and operate the centre at its headquarters in Centurion, which serves as the IEC's main contact centre. The agency also facilitated the voter registration weekend at the beginning of November.

SITA service management GM Beare Ramlal explains SITA was well positioned to win the tender, as it already had the technology in place. In 2005, SITA established the contact centre as part of government's service delivery platform. However, the deal fell through, as government did not see value in the partnership.

“There was reluctance from government because it felt SITA's services were too expensive,” Ramlal says. But, he points out, since the facilities are already in place, utilising the contact centre is a worthwhile and cost-effective proposition for the IEC.

The contact centre runs on two technologies. The first is a unified communications solution, the Aspect Telephony System, which has the ability to scale up to thousands of agents. The second is a service management technology, Remedy ITSM7.

One of the IEC's requirements was for SITA to accommodate its services in multiple languages, which SITA is expanding on. “We are working extremely hard with the IEC and we think the next registration weekend is going to be critical for us. We will make sure that everything that needs to happen will happen,” says Ramlal.

He adds that SITA's contact centre has the ability to enable citizens to send their queries via e-mail and SMS.

“The first deliverable is to provide e-government entry that provides information, interaction and integration. The second is to provide service management services.”

In terms of service delivery, Ramlal says the IEC and SITA have learnt lessons from past experiences, such as the previous registration weekend, which left the IEC Web site and the contact centre completely overwhelmed during the first day of registration.

During that voter registration weekend, the new contact centre was put to the test with its interactive voice response (IVR) system handling the calls. The contact centre received 60 000 calls per day. During the first day, the IVR system went down for two hours, says Ramlal, adding that strategies have been implemented to prevent similar problems during future registration weekends.

SITA currently has 100 agents dedicated to the IEC contact centre, with 50 on shift at a time.

“SITA is in discussions with the IEC about the possibility to upscale to 200 contact centre agents for the upcoming registration weekend,” says Ramlal. This training will result in double the amount of agents.

SITA's contract with the IEC extends until the provincial elections. The agency will scale down the operation after the elections.

* Do you think the IEC and SITA have done enough to ensure the same chaos does not recur at the next voter registration weekend? Give us your opinion via our feedback facility.