Mahmood Al Bastaki, Business Process Re-engineering Consultant, Dubai eGovernment, addressing a seminar on Regional Call Centre Trends in Dubai. In addition, it initiated more than 20,000 outbound calls, 550 online chats and over 50 faxes. These figures were provided by Mahmood Al Bastaki, Business Process Re-engineering Consultant, Dubai eGovernment, while speaking at a seminar on Regional Call Centre Trends in Dubai.
'Dubai eGovernment's AskDubai service is designed to be a single point of contact to all the government departments in Dubai, available 24 hours a day with bilingual support and multiple channels of communication,' said Al Bastaki. 'It is a unified point for inquiries, complaints and feedback and has been used effectively by some departments to outsource their customer care requirements.'
He outlined the advantages of AskDubai, such as a single toll-free number 7000 40000, an Internet Call Centre (ICC) with a look and feel in line with the Dubai eGovernment portal, which provides interactive on-line chatting with a customer care representative. Departments will harness substantial benefits and become more customer-centric.
'Ever since AskDubai went live in June 2003, four government departments have outsourced their customer care operations to us. All the four departments have come back to us with a positive feedback. The ability of AskDubai to handle both informational and transactional services has been highly appreciated by them. Our future plans entail expanding the contact centre service to all the government departments, creating public awareness campaigns to encourage use of Ask Dubai among the community and businesses. We will introduce a CRM solution to gradually build a government knowledge base.'
Commenting on the role played by modern-day contact centres, Al Bastaki said: 'Modern-day call centres offer a much-needed bridge between consumers and service providers with numerous advantages such as real-time support, 24x7 accessibility and multiple channels of communications, including telephone, Internet and SMS. They can make significant contribution to an organisation's growth, because they represent a perfect channel of communication between an organisation and its customers.'
'A contact centre plays many roles. It helps customers who are hesitant to do transactions without real-time support, or are not confident about exact options to select on a portal. A contact centre is of immense help when the customer makes a mistake and needs clarifications on certain issues. The biggest advantage is that a contact centre is available round the clock, allowing people to do their transaction after office hours, and from the comfort of their homes. Moreover, call centres have made the biggest contribution of reducing physical queues at service counters,' added Al Bastaki.
Al Bastaki said AskDubai offered government departments an ideal solution through outsourcing. 'Outsourcing helps in various ways. It speeds up implementation, saves investment costs, ensures professional maintenance and enables the organisation to focus on its core business. It eliminates the need to develop a whole department, complete with hi-tech infrastructure and trained staff.'
Dubai eGovernment is a pioneering initiative in the region to provide online services across the spectrum of corporate and community life in the emirate. It also has a vision to integrate individually automated government departments under the single umbrella of the eGovernment initiative, thus empowering employees across lines of businesses and levels of government, besides facilitating the lives of citizens and customers of the government. Dubai has taken a lead in the region in deploying eGovernment applications and is among the first few governments in the world to provide such integrated services to its citizens. The eGovernment portal (www.dubai.ae) is a single contact point masking the complexity of the bureaucratic procedures, and guiding access to all services in the easiest possible way. In addition, the eGovernment initiative seeks to improve and enhance procedures by maximizing the benefit from technology, so that users from all walks of life will be able to utilize the portal for their specific needs with considerable ease.
Quelle: AME Info, 18.05.2004
