Peeping at the Nigerian Research and Development Centres: NAERLS Updates on National Farmers Helpline Centre II

Peeping at the Nigerian Research and Development Centres: NAERLS Updates on National Farmers Helpline Centre II

My last note in the first part of this article was a question I asked "When can Nigerians start to enjoy National Farmers Helpline Centre (NFHC)?". The journey of NFHC to the present position was tortuous with several barbered wires but by dint of hard work and dedication, NAERLS was able to transform the NFHC from a mere conception of idea to the present reality. However, the journey of NFHC to its final destination where it can achieve its primary objective is not yet over. The primary objective is to provide timely relevant and proven information and advisory agricultural extension services to stakeholders in Nigerian agricultural industry. Such information and services will definitely facilitate decision-making of the agricultural value chain actors along the entire agricultural network with likely outputs of tripling the national productivity of agricultural sector.  What are the necessary requirements for the centre to be fully operational and efficient?

In order to have an efficient and sustainable call center, NAERLS has to collaborate with relevant stakeholders in the area of capacity building. This is because the success of a call center largely depends on the technical skills of the personnel at its disposal. High caliber human resources with vast experience on agricultural subjects and ICT are required to manage the centre as well as provide support to the centre. Therefore, the fundamental areas of capacity building for the NAERLS staff required are Call Agent/Subject Matter Specialist training, Technical Support training, Contact Centre Management, Content development and management training. These trainings could be on-site or off-site the Call Center with emphasis to integration of the ICT and agricultural knowledge based services. Thus, NAERLS has to be opened for support and collaboration to achieve desired results.

The centre has acquired the knowledge-based software, a prerequisite for the content development and successful operation of the centre. With a rich and wide range of agricultural extension publications, NAERLS specialists are assiduously working to digitize and populate the knowledge based software for use by the call agents. So far, thousands of pages of the content covering more than 80 agricultural commodities and practices have been developed. When the content is fully developed, call agents will be receiving calls from farmers, researchers, students and interested individuals on issues or problems in respect of their farming, marketing and processing as case may be. The call agents will look for the answers to the queries received from callers by keying in the appropriate "catchy" words in the knowledge based software, which promptly prop-ups the relevant answers from the content. These content development activities are number priority for the smooth operation of the centre. It is imperative that other relevant stakeholders should come forward to help in the content development to facilitate the smooth take up. In addition to content development, software at NAERLS disposal was developed by private agency, which has exclusive copy right that limits of the software by NAERLS. Hence, it is desirable that NAERLS ICT personnel should develop their software for effective and sustainable utilization to serve the Nigerian population. However, their capacity need to developed to accomplish such task. This requires the support of public agencies such as National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) and Backbone Galaxy to rely round for this important national assignment.

Another key priority is building the capacity of the call agents. NAERLS is starting with thirty call agents who are mostly graduates of agriculture sciences and engineering. Although, they have been working as agricultural extensionist, subject matter specialists and technologists but their new task of receiving and answering calls is daunting  and challenging and thus, requires special training.

 The next in the list of priority is the contact centre management training. The Information and Computer Technologies are evolving at exponential proportion.  In order to keep up with global trend and best practices in this area of information dissemination using call centre,  the call centre managers must be regularly and promptly trained on knowledge and practices regarding installation, management and maintenance skills of the centre equipment and services.

The next important task is the use of the short code to call the center. It is gratifying that the centre in collaboration with the relevant stakeholders secured a short code from National Communication Commission as 1442 for usage by the callers. However, this short code is yet to be integrated into the country’s major GSM service providers (MTN, Airtel, Glo, etc) for easy access and cost effective to users. Although, efforts are on top gear for the short code integration but it is doubtful if the calls using the short code will be toll free services to farmers as revealed by the ongoing discussion at the stakeholders meeting. Some of the stakeholders are of the opinion that the calls should be charged for efficient and sustainable operation of the centre. The views of experts from NAERLS is that the call services should be toll free at least in the first two years while charges should be shared among the GSM service providers as part of their corporate social responsibility. The government may provide incentives to the GMS service providers inform of tax relieve and provision of infrastructure or subsidy to the callers. This is most desirable and attractive to the peasant farmers of Nigeria.

Another important issue requiring effort is awareness creation of the centre services. Here, an intensive campaign using both electronic and print media is required to sensitize Nigerians on access to these phone based agricultural advisory services. This certainly requires funds for reaching out to millions of Nigerian farmers. 

How will the centre provide its services? The call centre is a two level interaction system which consist of Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and Human Response (HR). This means that the centre operations basically services callers using the two levels. At the first level of interaction with the caller with  interactive voice response, the system is programmed to response in the five major communication media in Nigeria (English, pidgin, Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba). The caller will choose the language he or she prefers to communicate. Then, there will be pre-recorded answers or responses on the specific questions of the agricultural commodity value chain using frequently ask questions (FAQ), questions and answers (Q&A) already on the previous NAQAS database. Where the needs of the caller are met at this level, the communication ends. But where the caller’s needs/questions are not met/answered, he or she is transferred to an agent (help desk at the centre), who is a specialist in the area so concerned and proficient in the language of the enquirer. Meanwhile, all calls are recorded so as to enrich the database of the centre. There will be call escalation for cases unsolved or questions unanswered, the caller is profiled and stored on the system and later contacted or given toll-free access to the contact at the Centre. The call escalation will use the services of experts within NAERLS, other agricultural research centres or even outside Nigeria using the internet services or video conferencing tools. The centre can also use bulk Short Message Services (SMS) to send information on the thematic subjects, example information on weather, inputs, markets and early warning or advices as case may be.