For the New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC), going high tech has brought its own side-effects. The agency, which was the first out of all utility bodies in the Capital to introduce a voice-overlap technology in its public grievance redressal system, is now juggling with hundreds of unsettled complaints for want of the perfect voice match of the complainant.
For effective complaint resolution, the civic body had created and launched its own Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software early last year. However, to ensure satisfaction of the complainant, the civic body had made it mandatory for the call attendants at its call centre to match the voice of the caller before closing the case. But to the utter surprise of the NDMC, the complainant’s voice could not be matched in a number of cases as the complaints were made mostly by the PCR staff in the VVIP areas.
Officials said, most of these complaints were related to sanitation, tree pruning or barking of stray dogs where the complaint is not lodged by the residents but their personal staff or policemen. “As it is a VIP area, almost seven per cent of the calls at our call centres are made by the police control room. Sometimes, other family members also answer the ‘outgoing call’. As a result, there are around 350 cases which are hanging because the voice of the complainant did not match during the outgoing call,” said a senior NDMC official. Incoming call in a CRM software is the one in which a complainant calls at the NDMC’s helpline number to register a grievance. An outgoing call is one in which the call centre attendant contacts the complainant enquiring if the grievance was redressed. “A complaint is closed only when the voice in the incoming and outgoing calls are proven to be the same,” added the official.
To counter this, the civic agency is set to launch a photo-mobile application. As for the pending cases, the NDMC has kept it on hold as it plans to go through each complaint and ensure if it was actually addressed or not.