In its quest to reach a higher number of poor and rural communities across the country, Legal Aid South Africa has upgraded its Cisco network and has also converted its legacy PABX-based infrastructure to Cisco's IP Communications platform.
Local Cisco partner and converged network provider, KSS Technologies, implemented the upgrade and also installed Cisco's call centre solution to offer a national infrastructure for delivery.
According to Andile Mbatyoti, Legal Aid SA Information Systems Executive, the previous system was outdated and inefficient. “In addition to the current mandate of providing legal services in criminal matters, we aim to sharpen our focus on legal civil matters. With limited budget and resources, we need to utilise state-of-the-art technology to make us more accessible to rural communities, especially for those in low income areas.”
Legal Aid SA needs to ensure that vulnerable groups are protected, empowered and educated. Communities must be aware of their constitutional rights and obligations. Access to timeous and quality services is therefore critical in order to make this a reality.
“Technology is key to achieving our mission and mandate - to be a leading provider of quality, professional legal services, ensuring effective access to justice for the poor and vulnerable, in an independent, efficient and caring manner. To become more efficient and to improve our service delivery, we took a decision to upgrade our system to Cisco IP communications platform,” he explains.
“In addition to implementing the Cisco IP communications platform, the Unified Communications Manager, KSS also rolled out Cisco's call centre solution, IP Contact Center Express, which offers automatic call distribution (ACD), interactive voice response (IVR), and computer telephony integration (CTI) on a single platform,” adds KSS account manager Zakes Sikobi.
Cisco Unified Communications Manager, the IP telephony call-processing component of the Cisco Unified Communications solution, offers a variety of benefits including reduced deployment time, quicker return on investment, lower ongoing operational costs and improved business continuity.
Legal Aid SA required a centralised management system with modules that share a common set of back-end services and advanced capabilities. It needed a common platform without the need to purchase fragmented, expensive third-party tools. This truly unified, or singular, architecture performs all data management functions quickly, easily, and reliably from a single console. Managed data, content indexed into a single virtual pool, can be viewed across all applications, platforms, devices, and locations.
Legal Aid SA Network Manager Joe Khosa points to the Cisco Call Centre as a tool to extend Legal Aid SA's footprint. “It just made good business sense to upgrade the Cisco infrastructure to incorporate the contact centre rather than deploying new technology. We are driving costs down and we have already realised the improvement with the quality assurance of services rendered by the more than 1 500 Legal Aid SA lawyers countrywide.”
With Cisco's call centre solution being managed centrally, Legal Aid SA can expand at a lower cost and can offer an array of additional services like SMS notifications to keep clients informed on the progress of their cases. More importantly, Legal Aid SA can now communicate more effectively with private attorneys who contract in areas where Legal Aid SA is not represented. Claims can also now be submitted and processed more efficiently.
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