Nigeria FG Launches Government Contact Centre with the Sum of N679 million

2016 Nigeria Federal Government at the weekend launched the Government Contact Centre (GCC) with the sum of N679 million, essentially a technology-enabled multi-channels and multi-lingual platform developed to improve accessibility to government services and information by interested parties.

The platform presents citizens and interested stakeholders with an avenue to obtain information on government Ministries, Departments, Agencies (MDAs), Adebayo Shittu, minister of communications technology at the launch, said.

The platform also provides access to services via telephone (multi-lingual agents, Hausa, Ibo, Yoruba, English and Pidgin English), Shittu said further, saying, “Other languages would also be incorporated subsequently with email, chat and social media also on target.”

The minister noted further that the centralised nature of the deployment made it available to serve various government MDAs 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 fibre 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.”

According to Shittu, there will be second level agents and mini-help desk facilities within the various MDAs to respond to more specific requests with professional detail.
In his own submission, Emeka Okafor, managing director of Interra Networks, who served as consultant to the Federal Government in developing the GCC, said the main objective of the centre was to bring governance closer to the people and make it more participatory.