Launched in March 1952, The Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation, popularly known as EPFO, is perhaps the earliest social security scheme for workers in Independent India. It came into effect a mere 830 days after the Constitution was adopted.
Nearly 7 crore active members
The EPFO now has about 6.8 crore active members. According to news reports, the multilingual contact centre that the organisation has planned will receive grievances for redressal around the clock.
The organisation has already published a tender to set up this mechanism.
23 languages
To help employees from anywhere in the country, the authorities have planned the service in as many as 23 Indian languages. These are: Assamese, Bengali, Bodo, Dogri, English, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Maithili, Malayalam, Manipuri, Marathi, Nepali, Odia, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Santhali, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu.
The step seems to be in response to recent complaints from members that their grievances are not being heard quickly, resolutions are taking undue time and the process needs to be improved quickly.
Single-window interface
The new plan envisages setting up a single-window interface for the user members.
The EPFO is managed by a central board of trustees which is formed for a tenure of 5 years. The EPFO handles the crucial task of managing retirement funds for a growing number of employees around the country.
According to the tender, the aim is to create a system with “quality people, a robust system which can replace EPFO’s grievance registration portal (EPFiGMS) with a more advanced and sophisticated grievance system”.
Complaints across multi-channels
The tender also stated that the new system will be designed 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 earlier launched a helpline with a toll-free number (1800118005) – later replaced by a code (14470) – for redressal of queries. But it never seemed to work smoothly.
“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,” the organisation has now said.
Redressing consumer complaints is one of the key functions of every people-facing organisation. The Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation is putting up a 24X7 system for this purpose. Biz News Business News – Personal Finance News, Share Market News, BSE/NSE News, Stock Exchange News Today
