FBR’s New Contact Center Deals with Taxpayers in Real Time

Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) has launched a newly-furbished and modern contact center to promptly respond to taxpayers’ queries and provide them relevant information in real time.

The contact center was inaugurated by the chairman of FBR, Dr. Muhammad Irshad and later on he was briefed by Member FATE Dr. Fazal Muhammad Abrejo.

Dr. Fazal reported that the facility is based on CRM (Customer Relationship Management) Software, which is currently being used by world’s best companies to improve their customer experience.

The CRM software also assists in analyzing issues which arise frequently and take time to resolve. According to Dr. Fazal, the taxpayers will now be able to resolve frequently reported issues over the phone when they call the helpline.

The installed CRM has the capacity to track, monitor, and archive issues reported by the taxpayers.

The software will also be linked with NADRA (National Data Base and Registration Authority) database, through which relevant information will be updated automatically such as:

• Date of birth,
• Special person credit,
• Senior citizen credit,
• Name correction,
• CPR (Computerized Payment Receipt) issues,
• Income Tax return information.

Dr. Fazal also mentioned that various training sessions have been conducted to educate the Contact Center employees.

The first training titled ‘Professionalism and Courtesy’ was held recently. Its purpose was to educate the agents regarding basic etiquettes of talking to clients. After this, a second training session also comenced, and it delved into technical information regarding basic tax laws related to return filing and wealth statement. Lastly, the third training session introduced basic Sales Tax and FED return filing and related issues.

Briefing the chairman, Dr. Fazal also added:

Previously there was no CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software in place at FBR through which a taxpayer could lodge a complaint either by calling or visiting the website.

Consequently, it was also not possible to monitor the kind of issues that are frequently reported and time taken to resolve an issue.

According to the available statistics, the number of dropped calls had gone down from 50 percent in Oct 2016 to less than 2 percent in April 2017.

The new contact center also helped reduce the average hold time, the time a person remains on the line before an agents answers the call on helpline UAN, from 30 minutes in Oct 2016 to less than 30 second in April 2017.

Via PkRevenue