Abu Dhabi: Next time when you find an insect in the food served at a restaurant in Abu Dhabi Emirate, it is very easy to report it to food safety authority by using your smart phone.
Abu Dhabi Food Control Authority (ADFCA) has introduced a smart phone application that will help residents to report the food safety violations with pictures. The application itself will identity the location of the incident.
The authority has initially introduced the application for Android based smart phones but its another version for other smart phones will be ready very soon, a senior official told Gulf News on Wednesday.
“This app will act as our [authority’s] eye in the hands of people,” Mohammad Jalal Al Raisi, Director of Communication and Community Service at ADFCA, said.
The application named ADFCA is available in Google Play Store and it can be easily downloaded within a few seconds, the official said.
A module namely ‘Food Safety Guard’ in the application helps residents to report food safety violations.
When a resident takes a picture of an incident by using that module, it gets stored automatically on the device itself and upon submitting the report, it will be sent to authority’s “Case Management System”, Al Raisi said.
The incident will get logged to the authority’s backend Customer Relations Management [CRM] application, where the complaint process will be handled by the respective inspectors. “We will take immediate action upon receiving the complaints,” the official said.
The Food Safety Guard will show the history of the complaints filed by the customer.
To use the module, the user has to feed his or her name in the profile section.
“This is our strategy of opening new communication channels with the public. We have been receiving the complaints through Abu Dhabi Government contact centre [toll free number 800555]. Now a second channel has been opened,” Al Raisi said.
The authority also receives huge response from residents through its Facebook and Twitter accounts also. But the complainants using those channels have been advised to call up the contact centre to register formal complaint as it needs specific details, he said.
However the complaints reported though the mobile application will be registered formally and people do not need to call up the contact centre, the official said.
The users have a choice to get various notification, alerts, tips related to food, agriculture and livestock etc. through the application.
Apart from Food Safety Guard, the app also has other modules for customer services, supplier services, surveys, publications and map services.
The authority’s customers like food businesses will be able to do some official transactions through “customer services” module.
“This app is just a beginning. Our ultimate aim is to enable all our customers to complete all transactions without the need to visit our offices at all,” Al Raisi said. “It may take time, but we are working on it.”
The Map Services module assists users in finding and contacting any ADFCA facility –administration offices, vet clinics, fodder centres, customer service centres, stores, irrigation centres and research centres.
