When Cleopatra Taona went to the Randfontein testing centre for her driver’s-licence test at the beginning of June this year, she failed. If that was not a daunting enough experience, she has since been unable to make a second appointment.
”I called the GP [Gauteng] call centre to get a new date, whereupon I was told that I would be put on a waiting list as it was fully booked for the next two months. But I was assured I would get a date by July,” she says.
July came and went, and Taona did not receive a response from the call centre until she decided to call again a month later. ”This time I was told that I had been given an appointment via SMS. I don’t remember getting an SMS,” she says.
Those who intend to get a learner’s or driver’s licence in Gauteng seem set for a first-hand taste of bureaucracy. The licensing process is not only challenging because of the chances of failing the practical test, but making an appointment is equally intimidating.
Before the introduction of the call-centre system in 2004, aspiring drivers had to book at one of the province’s testing centres. Now there is a central, subsidised provincial telephone number that is used for bookings.
The call-centre system, also known as the live booking system, is run by the Gauteng Shared Services Centre (GSSC) on behalf of the provincial government. Bookings are not the only task performed by the three Gauteng-based call centres.
”The GSSC is a provider of back-office support functions for all departments of the Gauteng provincial government. We provide support in IT, human resources, audit and procurement. We are also custodians of the Gauteng Contact Centre, which provides access to all government services through the telephone. This includes learner’s and driver’s tests for the department of public transport, roads and works,” says the GSSC’s media liaison, Emmanuel Mdawu.
An agent who works at the call centre in Wynberg who asked not to be named says the agents’ job is just to take calls and take down information about clients.
”The system is designed to send text messages to clients to notify them about test dates; nobody sits and sends text messages all day,” the agent says, adding that no one tells the agents the reasons for system failures. ”All we are told is to tell the callers that the test centres are all fully booked.”
Business Day on Friday reported that the GSSC’s call centre had a system crash for two weeks at the beginning of August, which resulted in a delay of 11 000 bookings a day.
An official at the Randburg testing centre says the call-centre system will never work. ”I called the call centre to book an appointment for my son’s learner’s test and I was told that Randburg was fully booked. That was a lie because I work here and I know that there are more than enough slots,” the official says.
The South Africa Institute of Driving Instructors (Saidi) is an NGO that has been contesting the live booking system since its introduction. Pat Allen, Saidi chairperson in Pretoria, says the institute has launched a petition against the system. ”We are trying to get more appointments from the provincial call centre and we are also expressing our frustrations on the unfair allocation of the few dates available.”
”The call-centre system works on a first-come, first-serve basis,” the Wynberg agent says. ”We try to balance the equation between people who call on a regular basis and those that are on the waiting list,” he said, adding that the centre encourages people to call regularly to get the randomly allocated appointments.
Saidi says it is tired of the department’s ”constant changes in procedure without notification”. One such change was the email booking system that was launched in the Tshwane municipality in July this year and removed again in August.
Tshwane’s director of licensing services, Johan J Kok, says that the email system was only temporary. ”The email system was brought by Tshwane in order to fill up the empty slots, which the call centre was unable to do.”
Kok also says the call-centre system was introduced to ”regulate the number of clients turning up at the centre looking for services and avoid long queues and frustrations”. However, frustrations have escalated as a result of the live booking system’s shortcomings.
The Randburg testing-centre official says something needs to be done about this situation. ”We are meant to accommodate a maximum of 25 people to sit in at each session of the learner’s test and today [Wednesday] there were only eight people, but when we call the call centre, they say it’s fully booked.”
Some people still visit testing centres to try their luck with bookings. ”We tell them that we can’t help them and that they have to call the [call-centre] line, but I wish we could help them,” the official says.
He adds that the provincial department of transport doesn’t realise how serious this problem is.
Kok told the M&G Online that the traffic department is in continuous communication with the province to help alleviate these problems. However, numerous attempts by the M&G Online during the past week to get comment from the department of transport all failed.