Explained: EPFO's Round-The-Clock 'Contact Centre' And What It Will Do

The Employees' Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) is working on a round-the-clock multilingual "contact centre" for its nearly seven crore active subscribers. The planned centre will remain functional 24×7 across 365 days. The move is aimed at offering a single-window interface to those wanting to register complaints or requiring recourse to a redressal mechanism.

This comes after EPFO faced backlash on social media recently over delays in complaint resolution and an increase in the rates of rejection of settlement claims, The Indian Express reported.

A tender has been floated by the government body to set up this contact centre for "a robust system which can replace EPFO's grievance registration portal (EPFiGMS) with a more advanced and sophisticated grievance system".

With this proposed call centre, EPFO plans to replace its existing grievance registration portal, EPFiGMS with advanced registration and resolution software. 

How it will help people

The EPFO tender states that the proposed contact centre will be tasked with hearing/understanding the public grievance across the multi-channel -- helpline number; landline number of various offices; walk-in; grievance registration portals; WhatsApp; social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram; physical Daks, ChatBot, UMANG, e-mails among others.

It will solve the problem by linking the EPFO's head office with zonal offices and regional offices, besides addressing stakeholders' issues and keeping them informed on a real-time basis, The Indian Express report stated.

'23 languages'

The proposed contact centre will be multilingual with as many as 23 languages mentioned in its tender. These include 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's looking at transforming its EPFO Helpline into an "Integrated Grievance Management System" with a new grievance registration software. It also 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 government body stated.

EPFO had earlier started a helpline with a toll-free number (1800118005). Later, it was replaced with a short code (14470) to facilitate redressal of queries. Its helpline number, however, remained unreachable, reports said.

When will this start?

Regarding the operational status, EPFO has not yet provided any official release date for its call centre.

A query to the Ministry of Labour and Employment did not elicit any response, the report highlighted.

Eligibility for bidders

As per the EPFO tender, the prospective bidders should have "implemented at least two call centre projects of 500 seats each in the last three years".

Besides, the call centre must have been in operational stage as of now, it added.

As per the official data, 33.8 per cent or 24.93 lakh of the total 73.87 lakh claims received for final settlement in 2022-23 were rejected, while 46.66 lakh were settled. The remaining 2.18 lakh claims remained as "closing balance".