The Workers’ Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) is engaged on a round the clock multilingual “contact centre” for its practically seven crore energetic subscribers. The deliberate centre will stay useful 24×7 throughout twelve months. The transfer is aimed toward providing a single-window interface to these desirous to register complaints or requiring recourse to a redressal mechanism.
This comes after EPFO confronted backlash on social media just lately over delays in criticism decision and a rise within the charges of rejection of settlement claims, The Indian Categorical reported.
A young has been floated by the federal government physique to arrange this contact centre for “a sturdy system which might substitute EPFO’s grievance registration portal (EPFiGMS) with a extra superior and complicated grievance system”.
With this proposed name centre, EPFO plans to exchange its current grievance registration portal, EPFiGMS with superior registration and backbone software program.
The way it will assist folks
The EPFO tender states that the proposed contact centre will probably be tasked with listening to/understanding the general public grievance throughout the multi-channel — helpline quantity; landline variety of numerous places of work; walk-in; grievance registration portals; WhatsApp; social media platforms like Fb, Twitter and Instagram; bodily Daks, ChatBot, UMANG, e-mails amongst others.
It should remedy the issue by linking the EPFO’s head workplace with zonal places of work and regional places of work, apart from addressing stakeholders’ points and protecting them knowledgeable on a real-time foundation, The Indian Categorical report said.
’23 languages’
The proposed contact centre will probably be multilingual with as many as 23 languages talked about in its tender. These embrace Hindi, English, Assamese, Bengali, Kashmiri, Bodo, Dogri, Gujarati, Kannada, Konkani, Manipuri, Marathi, Maithili, Malayalam, Nepali, Odia, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Sindhi, Santhali, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu.
EPFO says it is taking a look at reworking its EPFO Helpline into an “Built-in Grievance Administration System” with a brand new grievance registration software program. It additionally intends to place vital channels to “govern, monitor and enhance subscriber satisfaction by the use of redressal of grievances, automate processes throughout places of work to resolve points quicker, enhance service pace and high quality by automating frequent requests from challenge to decision,” the federal government physique said.
EPFO had earlier began a helpline with a toll-free quantity (1800118005). Later, it was changed with a brief code (14470) to facilitate redressal of queries. Its helpline quantity, nonetheless, remained unreachable, experiences mentioned.
When will this begin?
Relating to the operational standing, EPFO has not but supplied any official launch date for its name centre.
A question to the Ministry of Labour and Employment didn’t elicit any response, the report highlighted.
Eligibility for bidders
As per the EPFO tender, the possible bidders ought to have “applied no less than two name centre initiatives of 500 seats every within the final three years”.
In addition to, the decision centre will need to have been in operational stage as of now, it added.
As per the official information, 33.8 per cent or 24.93 lakh of the whole 73.87 lakh claims obtained for ultimate settlement in 2022-23 had been rejected, whereas 46.66 lakh had been settled. The remaining 2.18 lakh claims remained as “closing stability”.
