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SITA took on the monumental task to operate a contact service centre for the national elections organised by the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) in April 2009.

SITA has made a major shift in terms of running its contact service centre and making it more customer-orientated and services-focused to become more competitive.

In November 2008, SITA competed and was awarded a multimillion-rand tender to operate a contact service centre for the national elections organised by the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC).

SITA took on the monumental task of making sure that citizens’ calls and queries prior to the elections, during the registration weekend as well as on election day, would be addressed and managed efficiently. In terms of the contract, SITA set out to host and operate the centre at its headquarters in Centurion.

SITA service management general manager Beare Ramlal says that SITA was well positioned to win the tender as it already had the technology infrastructure in place. In 2005, SITA established the service centre as part of government’s service delivery platform and, therefore, already had the technology and could then upscale it to fit the needs of the IEC.

According to Ramlal, because the core of the call centre infrastructure was already in place, the IEC had all the benefits of a multimillion-rand platform at cheaper costs. He notes that huge economies of scale were achieved and it was a matter of extending the platform to accommodate the IEC’s requirements. One of the IEC’s wishes was for SITA to facilitate its call centre services in multiple languages. SITA succeeded in doing so by employing specialised agents who could communicate with the caller in Afrikaans, Zulu, Sotho, Tsonga, Venda and English.

Taking on the challenge

Ramlal says: “Three days after we had been informed by the IEC that our bid had been successful, we went live with our current call centre agents. We took a business risk and prepared for the option that we would win the tender. The stakes were high, and we wanted to be prepared because we knew that if we won the tender, we had to deliver on our promises. We believe we’ve achieved that.” The backbone of the call centre runs on two technologies. The first is a unified communications solution called the Aspect Telephony System, which has the ability to scale up to thousands of agents. The second is a service management technology called Remedy ITSM7.

One of the biggest challenges for SITA was to scale up to 100 agents and then to the recommended 200 agents within a relatively short period of time. Ramlal says that SITA had to interview around 600 candidates before they ended up with the final 200 call centre agents who had the right level of skill.

Lessons learned

During the first voter registration weekend on 8 and 9 November 2008, the service centre was put to the test with its interactive voice response (IVR) system set out to handle the massive amount of calls coming through. During that weekend, the contact centre received a total of 59 304 calls.

The biggest hurdle that SITA faced was the fact that it didn’t have a base line from which to work. Ramlal points out that SITA asked the IEC for statistics from previous elections, but during the voter registration weekend, the numbers were unprecedented.

Based on the IEC’s requirements and the service level agreements signed, there was a clear underestimation of the number of calls coming through during the first voter registration weekend. It was discovered that its IVR system was under-equipped to handle the huge amount of calls received.

“Going into the second voter registration weekend, which took place on 7 and 8 February 2009, we made new assumptions based on the first voter registration weekend and upped our game to cater for that. We documented the IP systems and we had the lessons learned in terms of managing the calls for the IEC’s next round of elections,” says Ramlal. The second voter registration received a total of 81 569 calls, of which 37 061 came through on the 7th and 44 508 on the 8th.

Strong commitment

Ernest de Villiers, SITA programme manager for the IEC, says: “This was an excellent experience. It was challenging but the role that we played on such an issue of national importance was worth it.” The highest number of calls - 47 952 - came through on 21 April, a day before election day. The IEC election day itself, held on 22 April, was very successful and ran smoothly, with the contact centre receiving 32 602 calls in total. The average time it took before a call was answered by the call centre agent was seven seconds, according to SITA’s Aspect canvas, the system that monitors the number of calls coming in.

On election day, when voting was extended given the unprecedented numbers, SITA made a business decision that exceeded their contractual obligations: it set out teams comprising of agents and team leaders to stay until midnight to assist people who did not have Internet access with information on what was happening around extended times and anticipated news on results.

If someone called with a question that the call centre agent was not able to answer immediately, they would get the relevant information from the IEC and then phone back the caller. The service centre also made use of other network technologies to enable South African citizens to send their queries via e-mail and SMS.

Says De Villiers: “We underestimated the complexity and labour-intensiveness of the project given the response to these elections. On the positive side, a key lesson learnt was that taking a business risk to support government and the country outside of the traditional boxes of obligation and going over and above the call of duty is worth all the work, when one assesses what it meant for the country.”

Anthea Summers, SITA communications general manager, says that SITA is taking services to government, which have been conceptualised by SITA, to showcase what it can provide to improve service delivery and government operations. The IEC is a case in point.

According to Summers, one of the key success factors behind SITA’s efforts in running the call centre was its innovative business approach. “The foundation that guided SITA’s approach was to synergise work across departments, to break traditional boundaries and bureaucracies and put responsiveness to the customer and project needs as key.

“The IEC call centre pushed boundaries in ways that we didn’t expect. It was an important lesson learned because SITA showed how it is flexible on demand, it can work cross–functionally internally and it can take calculated risks to provide services. Internally, we broke the bureaucracies and hierarchies completely to ensure that the call centre was set and that it ran efficiently. The clients’ needs ruled supreme and SITA as a whole responded to meet their expectations.”

C O N T A C T

Beare Ramlal

General Manager SITA Service Management Centre
Tel: 012-672-1541
E-mail: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Website: www.sita.co.za