Customer Service Portal at Ministry of Finance

Customers of the Ministry of Finance and the Public Service will now find it much easier to receive attention, with the recent launch of its Customer Support Portal.

Director of Customer Service at the Ministry, Rory Stennett, told JIS News that the portal will allow the Ministry’s customers to get responses to their queries quickly.

“We have an online platform that allows us to receive emails or allows customers to create a profile and log in and talk to us directly about a service they want to access. We call it the Customer Support Portal. We are adding a range of services to it but, essentially, customers can initiate several of our services from that platform,” Mr. Stennett said.

Once persons visit the Ministry’s website, there is a chat box available. When a member of the Ministry’s Customer Service team is available to chat, an icon will be displayed, and the customer can click and interact with a team member directly.

He explained the various ways persons can access the portal. “If you email us using custserve@mof.gov.jm a ticket is automatically generated, and it will also give you a link to access the portal. At that link, you can create a password or just log in without a password, it has what’s called a one-time password,” Mr. Stennett explained.

“You can click ‘contact us’ on our website, which will give you a link to log on to the portal. And there’s another link on the same page, which is on the footer, which says ‘customer service’. So, those are the methods to get in there. If you call our team and you want to give us something verbally that we have to escalate or work on over a longer time, we will create a ticket for you. We’ll collect your email address, and then that will generate a ticket to you with the way to log into the portal,” he added.

Mr. Stennett said the team usually has a quick response time to queries of one to two days.

“But our team has been responding within a day, generally, or even faster, depending on how many of our people are available,” he added.

The Customer Service Director noted that the resolution time to queries varies based on the nature of the issues.

“If it’s Access to Information (ATI), the legislation allows us 30 days to track down the information you need and to give it to you. So that’s built into the portal,” he said.

The Customer Support Portal was launched in April and became fully operational in July.

The Ministry says it has received positive feedback from its customers and plans to build out additional features to make the system even more efficient.

“Customers are quite surprised when they first interface with it because they’re surprised they get an instant ticket. But, over time, they’ve got the confidence that this thing will be handled, that we haven’t forgotten it.” Mr. Stennett said.

“There is a portion of this platform where when we resolve tickets, we send it back to the customer through the platform to say we think we’ve solved your issue, go ahead and close if you believe this. I’m surprised that customers are actually going in and closing it themselves, to show they are satisfied with the service,” he noted.