FG launches Government Contact Centre with N679mn

The Federal Government over weekend launched the government contact Centre, (GCC) with the sum of N679milliom which is essentially a technology-enabled multi-channels and multi-lingual platform developed to improve accessibility to government services and information by interested parties.
Adebayo Shittu, the Minister of Communications Technology at the launch said the platform presents citizens and interested stakeholders with an avenue to obtain information on Government Ministries, Departments, Agencies, MDAs .
He informed further that the platform also provides access to services via telephone,(multi-lingual agents, Hausa, Ibo, Yoruba, English and Pidgin English. Other languages would also be incorporated subsequently with email, chat and social Media also on target”
Shittu noted further that the centralized nature of the deployment makes it available to serve various government MDA’S as a reliable medium for making their services and information available to interested stakeholders as well as receiving feedback, without the extra investment in “Call Centre’ infrastructure.
While giving further information on the GCC, he said,” The GCC provides telephony, call routing, call recording and Advanced IVR Capabilities and much more through the use of cutting edge technology, the infrastructure is modular and scalable”
“The core network and back and equipment are hosted within the Government Data Centre and as such can easily be linked by all MDA’s on the fiber network being deployed by Galaxy backbone.
“The agents are outsourced and located within the facilities of our private sector collaborators. We currently have centres in Abuja, Lagos and Enugu all connected to the central infrastructure ”the minister explained.

According to him,” There will be 2nd level agents and mini-helpdesk facilities within the various MDAs to respond to more specific requests with professional detail.

In his own submission, Emeka Okafor the Managing director of Interra networks, who served as consultant to the federal government in developing the GCC told BusinessDay  that the main objective of the Centre is to bring governance closer to the people and make it more participatory.

He noted that the initiative would enable the leveraging of  ICT  to bring efficiency in government business.