The service run by the Social Fund launched over four years ago. Now it provides 100,000 people with information they require every day. Its operators have serviced 100 million calls to date. The landmark 100,000,000th call came late last week from Tyumen Region; the caller sought advice on applying for unified child allowance payments.
"About 2,000 operators work every day, helping our clients around the country solve their issues quickly and conveniently by phone," said Sergey Chirkov, Chairman of the Social Fund, when talking about the call center operation. "In the near future, we are planning to expand our use of artificial intelligence when handling calls, in particular, our use of speech generating neural networks. That will help us analyze incoming calls with more accuracy, rerouting them to operators best suited to handle them. New functions for getting information via an online operator chat are also coming soon."
The call center is a unified information system of social agencies, which, in addition to the Social Fund, also includes the Ministry of Labour, the Federal Service for Labour and Employment (Rostrud), medical and social assessment institutions, as well as well as regional social protection bodies. Information regarding social payments and public services is provided by phone: 8-800-100-0-001 (free of charge), or online.
The incoming inquiries are handled by a virtual assistant that resolves up to 20% of issues with no involvement from human operators and provides information on the most popular topics: how to use the maternity capital, apply for a contributory pension plan, change the payment delivery method or find the closest Fund office. The virtual assistant will refer the call to a center staff member in case more detailed information is needed. The consulting that uses personal data is subject to a strict caller identification.
Note that you can contact the Fund on any issues that concern you using other methods, such as the Fund's website, client offices or social media. The Social Fund uses social media as communication and feedback tools.