Durban - ETHEKWINI Municipality is seeking to spend R43.1 million on a new contact centre to replace its existing one.
A report from the city’s Governance and International Relations (GIR) department seeking budget approval for the new system was brought back before the executive committee yesterday after it was deferred in the last meeting because of a “lack of comprehensive breakdown” of the budget allocated for the project.
The city seeks a R43 137 523.00 approval for the acquisition and implementation of the Contact Centre Huawei Call Management Solution to replace its existing call centre system.
According to the report, the current city contact centres utilise the Genesys Call Management Solution which supports the electricity, revenue management and water and sanitation units.
Genesys was due for upgrade in 2017 but the tender for the project resulted in a non-award.
“Parallel to that process the disaster management unit acquired the Huawei system as it had an incident management functionality that the Genesys system could not provide. The Huawei has to date been implemented at the disaster management unit and is currently being utilised,” the report read.
It is not clear how much the city spent on the new system at the disaster management unit.
GIR argues that in order to ensure compliance to the governance and management of the city's Information Communication Technology Framework, which indicates that the city cannot acquire multiple systems that have multiple functionalities, Huawei was recommended.
“Currently contact centres are experiencing technical issues as a result of no third party support processes in place. These technical issues have resulted in customer calls not coming through as well as the deactivation of email services,” reads the report.
Sipho Cele, deputy city manager for GIR, said the sought-after system was famous and has been assessed.
“It’s the same system that’s used by Telkom in their call centres,” Cele said.
The IFP’s Mdu Nkosi supported the item raised but the DA abstained.
Nicole Graham, DA party caucus leader in eThekwini, said they had no issue with the item but “far more details” were needed for them to support the budget.