Facing criticism, EPFO plans 24X7 multilingual ‘contact centre’ to address complaints
- The Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) plans to set up a round-the-clock multilingual “contact centre” with the aim of offering a single-window interface to subscribers wanting to register a complaint or needing recourse to a redressal mechanism.
Highlights:
- The move to set up an integrated call centre for its nearly seven crore active subscribers has come in the wake of the retirement fund body facing backlash on social media platforms in recent months over delays in resolution of complaints and rising rates of rejection of settlement claims.
- The EPFO has floated a tender for setting up this contact centre, which would be functional 24×7 and 365 days, with “quality people, a robust system which can replace EPFO’s grievance registration portal (EPFiGMS) with a more advanced and sophisticated grievance system”.
- The aim is to “hear/ understand the grievance across the multi-channel [helpline number, landline phones of various offices, walk-in, grievance registration portals, WhatsApp, social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc.), physical Daks, ChatBot, UMANG, e-mails etc.]”, to allow problem-solving by linking the EPFO’s head office with zonal offices and regional offices, and proactively addressing stakeholders’ issues and keeping them informed on a real-time basis, the EPFO tender document said.
- The EPFO has listed 23 languages in the tender: Hindi, English, Assamese, Bengali, Bodo, Dogri, Gujarati, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Maithili, Malayalam, Manipuri, Marathi, Nepali, Odia, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Santhali, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu.
- “EPFO is looking to transform the EPFO Helpline into an Integrated Grievance Management System with a new grievance registration software and intends to put necessary channels to govern, monitor and improve subscriber satisfaction by way of redressal of grievances, automate processes across offices to resolve issues faster, improve service speed and quality by automating common requests from issue to resolution,”.
Prelims Takeaway:
- EPFO
- Digital India