The Unemployment Insurance Fund (UIF) is finding innovative ways to remove the need for claimants to physically go to Labour Centres to check the status of their payments.
This is to help people to use technology to make claims and receive their payments faster.
The UIF Management led by Commissioner Teboho’s Maruping together with governance structures of the Fund, including the UIF Board as well as Audit, Risk and Fraud Committees, this week conducted inspections and held client engagements at various Labour Centres around the country, to better understand and address operational inefficiencies at UIF service points.
Speaking to Independent Media at the Germiston Labour Centre this week, Maruping revealed that UIF was going to use WhatsApp as one of their innovative methods to help people with easy access when claiming.
“Development has been done, personnel are now busy creating and it will go through quality assistance. Give us three months, we don’t want to rush it, we need to put enough infrastructure in place in order to accommodate volumes that will come. Development is done, it is just going through testing then it will be ready for deployment this financial year,” said Maruping.
He said they didn’t want people in queues, and wanted to ensure through technological innovation that claimants got assisted from home.
With regard to possible job losses due to the introduction of technology, Maruping said people would be repurposed, and predicted that more work would be done as the human eye was always needed to confirm claims.
Maruping added that the staff would also be utilised to visit companies that were not compliant with UIF laws, “If we have less people queueing, and less work processing, it means now we will have more time for staff to go to companies and pursue non-compliance.
“My dream as a Commissioner is that if one hears that there has been an explosion somewhere and four people died, I want my team to be able to go to that company and say we know that your company is declaring a death benefit, we are here to help you apply for the death benefit.
“ We can do maternity differently, we can go to gynaecologists and check how many women are pregnant, and how many are due to deliver babies so that we offer services faster. We are prepared to change our model and use the staff differently, repurposing them. We are excited about this,” said Maruping.
He said among the innovations was a device that looked like a cellphone to enable people to use a USSD (*134*843#) which gave claimants options to choose from. Claimants can use the USSD to follow up on claims, continuation of payments and make complaints for free, using any cell phone including one which is not a smartphone. He said the UIF app with the same features can be downloaded from App stores.
Maruping said the online platform, u-filling, allows people to follow-up on their claims online. People also have access to free wifi at the labour centres where the youth can apply online, and there are people who can assist them to apply, create profiles, log in, and get reference numbers sent to their cellphones.
Maruping said UIF was carrying the costs for USSD and their app and online platform were zero-rated, meaning they are free, thanks to Vodacom’s contribution to their work.
Many people were using the online platforms, although some still wanted to go to the labour centres and engage with real people.
Maruping said the consumption patterns for the USSD and the mobile app showed that South Africans were keen to use the technology: “I think we had over 100K users in one week. We even had to reduce the number of times one can go to that platform, because you would find someone going to to check their status every second day. Costs were ballooning because people got excited in the hope the status would change within two days.
“We have limited access to three times a month so that costs don’t skyrocket. Just on Wednesday we paid about R140 million to more than 20 000 people, that just shows the speed. People can now sit and use the USSD to do their claims without leaving their homes.”
In terms of a deal with ABSA last year, people can get an automated and stamped UIF form from the ATM. There is a similar deal with Capitec, and UIF intends to do the same with other banks.
Maruping said UIF had also organised buses to go to deep rural areas for people to use their services.
He cautioned companies to comply with UIF regulations or suffer the consequences.
Saturday Star
ntombi.nkosi@inl.co.za