By ; Wael Elgafary 

The National Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of Egypt (NTRA) organized training workshops to improve the quality of life and raise the level of services provided for citizens in cooperation with five regulatory authorities. The workshops were held to implement the recommendations of the First Regulatory Forum for Citizen Services, held by NTRA in last December, pertaining to topics which have priority for citizens such as, management of user-complaint system, service-pricing mechanisms across the market as well as data and infrastructure security strategies. In fact, this step comes in collaboration with five regulatory authorities namely, the Egyptian Environmental Affairs Agency (EEAA), the National Organization for Social Insurance (NOSI), the Egyptian Water and Wastewater and Consumer Protection Regulatory Authority (EWRA), Waste Management Regulatory Authority (WMRA) and Land Transport Regulatory Authority (LTRA). 

The workshop for managing user-complaint system discussed strategies on how to interact with the citizens’ incoming complaints of different types. It also tackled the approach to receive and resolve complaints alongside the methods adopted to reduce the time interval for resolving such complaints. Furthermore, the workshop projected the achievements made by NTRA in managing complaints which include reinforcing communication channels with users by adding six digital channels to ease up the process of communication with NTRA, as well as establishing a service for receiving and solving complaints in Sign Language regarding telecom services for People of Determination. The workshop also reviewed the mechanisms of imposing fines and penalties on operators should they violate the standards set for user-complaint responses. 

It’s noteworthy that the First Forum for Citizen Services aimed to achieve participatory regulation among the regulatory authorities to maximize the use of digital services and make sure citizens have smooth access to them. It was also organized in line with supporting and enhancing the State’s efforts to achieve digital transformation and provide high-quality digitized services for citizens. Furthermore, 3 major axes had been addressed by the forum which were raising the social awareness of digital services and ways to obtain them, the importance and role of cybersecurity in securing critical infrastructure, as well as the regulatory and governing role of the State’s different regulatory authorities to preserve the rights of users and ways to achieve participatory regulation among entities in order to ensure citizens are satisfied with the services provided.