Government, and its entities, exist to service the public. Due to the volume of clients, the service mostly meets the expectations of the clients, which expectations are sometimes already lowered due to past experience or reputation.
In the event of dissatisfaction or information gap, clients need a point of contact where they can register their specific queries for attention. In this regard, the government, and in this case the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET), has a call centre that clients can contact. The DHET Call Centre maybe contacted through a voice call on 0800 87 2222 or via email on callcentre@dhet.gov.za
In the 2019/20 Annual Performance Plan the DHET reported that,
“The Department’s Call Centre received 21 322 (99.6%) enquiries to which it responded smoothly and satisfactorily during the 2017/18 financial year. 11 285 Toll Free calls were received and all (100%) were resolved. The reception staff received 3 439 enquiries and all (100%) were resolved spanning the period April 2017 to March 2018. Out of 6 465 website enquires received, 6 352 (98.3%) were resolved and 113 are still pending whilst the Walk in centre received 113 enquiries/complaints and all were resolved. The overall percentage of Presidential Hotline cases that were resolved is 99.8%.”
In addition various entities of DHET have their own contact details that can be accessed on this link where they are categorised by the type of query.
From the DHET APP it appears that the DHET Call Centre and its other points of contact have high query resolution rates. It is therefore sensible that queries be directed to these points of contact.
These departments invest in these points of contacts with appropriately trained personnel, equipment, as well as necessary software to manage queries. The software is important because it helps the trained personnel to channel and track the query until it is resolved. The use of this query tracking software is limited to the personnel that work in these point of contacts.
Clients who might be unhappy with the service of the call centre often contact other people in the department or entities. The people they contact usually are not trained to handle queries and do not have software for tracking queries. So they cannot give a reference number and usually they cannot recall from their memory what a specific query from a specific person was. But since they are public servants, they usually do not refuse to attend to clients even though they have zero capacity to attend to the query, or to channel it. Most people who will read this text are those that would have opted out of using a call centre.
In order to help someone who does not work at the call centre to channel your query, there is a few things that as a client you have to do.
Since the person does not work in the call centre, they receive hundreds of emails that relate to their area of work, which does not include queries, as queries are for the call centre. As a client you should try and email the query with a descriptive subject that gives an idea of what the query is about. Also include your contact number so that whoever your email will be channelled to can contact you if they need clarity.
When a person who does not work at the call centre receives your email, they usually channel it to someone, who will send it to someone, who will send it to someone, who will send it to someone, who will send it to someone, who will send it to someone, who will send it to someone who will attempt to resolve the query.
For example if the client has a NSFAS query, and they opt not to use the NSFAS call centre, and other NSFAS points of contact such as social media, email or the myNSFAS portal, but instead they opt to send it to someone who works at DHET. The person at DHET must first send the email to the DG’s office. The DG’s office will send it to the head of university/college unit in DHET, depending where the client is studying. The university/college head, will send it to someone responsible for funding in that unit. The person responsible for funding will send it to someone at NSFAS. The person who receives it at NSFAS will have to send it to the call centre agent who will attend to it. The call centre agent will then attend to it, and update the client, to avoid flooding the email inbox of the people who were in the email chain. However, some clients would like to get feedback from the person they sent the query to, which means the feedback has to travel the same route all the way back.
If one person in this email chain is on leave for two days, the email might be stuck in their inbox for two days until they come back. And since each of the people in the chain are not necessarily responsible for queries, if the email query is poorly written and it is unclear what the problem is and what solution is the client looking for, it might waste the reader’s time to try to understand it while they have other emails to attend to that relate to their work.
It would also prove difficult for the query to successfully go through the chain if it comes as a set of more than one email. As far as possible clients try to make their query fit into one email.
Evidently there are multi-layers of red tape on the department side. It helps if the red tape is reduced on the client side, meaning, it is better if the query is handled by the person concerned rather have someone bring the query on behalf of someone else.
Lastly, if a query is emailed to someone who does not work at the call centre, the best way to follow up is to forward the previous email so that the recipient, and others in the email chain, can see that the query was previously sent to them.
It is evident that this red tape is exhausting. The shortcut to cut through it is to use the dedicated points of contact available to clients on this link.
The other point of contact that is usually disregarded is the SRCs in both Colleges and Universities. The SRCs of each institution usually know a lot about the rules of the institution, what is permitted, how it should be done and what is not permitted. People who work at DHET usually do not know how each of the 21 universities and 50 Colleges do certain specific things. It helps for students to contact SRC first before trying other means of resolving their queries.
Besides the SRC there are other people in institutions who are responsible for specific things that can be contacted such as Students Support, Bursaries Office or the registrar.
Hopefully this helps understand how and where a query should be directed, and for the queries that are already sent, it clarifies how the query gets handled.
As an extra note, if a crime has been committed, it is best to open a case with the police. The department does not necessarily do arrests, as that requires a van and hand cuffs. It helps if clients bring to the department matters that relate to the department’s work.
Spot on!
Well explained and reasoned. The trouble is, the people/clients that normally feels the need to ignore established and effective help/call centres to resolve their queries, may not see this.
Alternatively, and that is where they do come across and actually do read this, they may feel the need to ignore all this. Believing that knowing someone higher up in the department situate them closer to decision makers in relation to their problem. And therefore decision makers must operate outside their scope (read: ignore the monumental work they’re appointed to do daily) and attend to something that really could be resolved easily by following what process has been established for resolving their issue😩🤦🏽♂️
My gripe has always been. Why must I, as the person you know, leave that which I’m paid to do, and attend to a single, normally time consuming errands that makes me take part in the flagrant disregard for what process my employer has created to resolve queries? Why must undermine all that 🤷🏽♂️
It’s okay to call/text and ask, who do I speak to for this and that problem. But to expect me to deal with quiries is disrespect🥺