Sri Lanka's citizen services call centre

Sunday, 20 May 2012

Digital Inclusion

By Jianggan Li | 3 May 2008

Sri Lanka demonstrates that developing nations can harness call centres to bridge the digital divide and deliver new levels of citizen service.

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FEATURE

The ICT Agency’s Government Information Centre (GIC-1919) is Sri Lanka’s first one-stop government call centre. It provides government-related information to the public in the key languages of Sinhala, Tamil and English . Its aims to give information about government services in an effective and friendly manner.

Dinuka Perera, Senior Project Manager of the ICTA says that the GIC is among the ICTA’s flagship projects under the ICTA’s re-engineering government programme. The programme is part of e-Sri Lanka, a six-pronged strategy working towards a connected country. Implemented by the ICT Agency of Sri Lanka, it covers a wide range of projects, cutting cross a wide range of thematic areas.

The creation of the GIC by ICTA in collaboration with the Presidential Secretariat was in response to the need to give the Government a more friendly and citizen-centric interface.

Perera highlights the key problems related to obtaining government information. “While the government is the key service provider to the citizens, the usual scenario is disorganisation, or generally a long time in obtaining the required information,” he says.

While there are around 1000 organisations existing in government, they are all modeled on a government-centric interface rather than a citizen-centric approach. “The Government is the key service provider with over 1000 services, but there has been no initiative to collect all information to one location,” he comments. “The Government Information Centre was just the solution for it, achieving the goal of providing government information at the citizens’ fingertips.”

With the launch of the GIC, the process of obtaining information regarding government services will now be easily accessible and hassle free. The GIC will provide callers with information regarding government procedure, such as in obtaining identity cards and driving licenses, . If the information required is not available on the GIC database, an agent will make it available within 24 hours.

The call centre open every day of the year and is accessible by dialling 1919 from any phone, from anywhere in the country and it provides ‘friendly, courteous and accurate service run by well-trained staff in the languages (Sinhala, Tamil or English)’.

The call is not toll free, but there is no premium charge attached to it. According to Dewapura, without the call centre, citizens would need to go over to the government and spend unnecessary time ‘running up and down’. “Therefore, spending simply LKR 5 (4 US cents) for a call for information, is certainly worth the expense,” he says.

“The GIC has reached a state of efficiency, where answers are in most cases instant. The information required, as a call agent, is mostly at top-of-mind,” says Moin Habib, CEO of Timex BPO (Pvt) Ltd, ICTA’s private partner in the GIC initiative.

Working with the private sector The operations and management of the GIC are handled via a public-private partnership model.

According to of Timex, three key factors, namely manpower, technology and process, were taken into consideration during the implementation of the GIC. The programme started with 7 people and is presently manned by 17 people, who have undergone training based on soft skills and basic service knowledge.

The knowledge base of the GIC is built in-house with trilingual support for every piece of the information related to government departments.

The ICTA at first started collecting information in English. It turned out that most information within different government departments was actually available in Sinhala, so trying to collect it in English proved to be quite a challenge. Therefore, the second round of information gathering was done via Sinhala, and then the ICTA translated it themselves.

The service level agreement of the GIC requires that any phone call from the public be answered within the first three rings. It also defines management of script, escalation mechanism, daily and monthly reporting procedures.

Service level enhancement at the GIC focuses on accurate information, higher levels of awareness of the GIC among the public, and post-call responses to callers, when information isn’t available at hand.

A number of quality assessment mechanisms, both internal and external, have been implemented to guarantee the quality of voice and knowledge of the staff, thus ensuring customer satisfaction. Internal assessment tools include side-by-side jacking, silent monitoring, coaching and Training Needs Analysis (the formal process of identifying the training gap and its related training need), while external tools are random sampling, mystery caller scheme and 3rd party verification.

The GIC started its operations on 11th April 2006, and for the first 18 months ICTA has recorded a total number of calls of 537,943 (9th Dec’ 07).

The ICTA expects that the next step for the GIC is a highly synchronized public sector information management, greater publicity and awareness programmes and greater coverage of departments by the GIC.

There are also new schemes to be rolled out for the public which include grievance handling and a service titled ‘Call the president’.

“Just automating the normal procedures and processes in government is not good enough. We’d still be carrying forward sometimes obsolete practices,” says Dewapura. “You need to re-engineer, because you have to think of it in entirety, you need to change the processes, and most importantly, the way people in the government think and work.”