South Africa: Contact Centre Improves Access to Home Affairs
Pretoria — Home Affairs Minister Malusi Gigaba has officially launched the department’s contact centre at the department’s head office in Pretoria.
The contact centre replaces the department’s call centre, while offering a multi-platform channel to provide clients with various options to interact with the department. These platforms include email and unstructured supplementary service data (USSD) services to better respond to queries in universally acceptable standards.
Members of the public can reach the contact centre on 0800 60 11 90.
Minister Gigaba said the erstwhile call centre could not deal with or address queries from members of the public, hence they launched the contact centre.
“With the contact centre, an operator is able to track the enquiry and be able to tell the client what is happening or at what stage the enquiry is,” he said.
The centre is manned by operators, who have received in-house training to handle enquiries. On average, each operator receives about 120 calls per day. Operators are able to deal with any enquiries relating to applications for IDs, birth certificates and other services offered by the department.
