Questions/Answers

The Public Authority for Consumer Protection (PACP) is formed in 2011 to develop a sustainable downstream chain to support Oman's thriving consumer market and protect consumer rights. Its primary objectives are to protect the market from price fluctuations, guarantee fair treatment, honesty and credibility, develop consumer general awareness, find prompt solutions to consumer complaints/notifications, and fight counterfeiting, swindling and monopoly. PACP strongly believes that providing an efficient, transparent and satisfactory service to the consumers can create a healthy and a prosperous consumer market. Therefore, it strives to protect consumer rights and promote awareness effectively, which requires participation from the consumers themselves. PACP aims at engaging the public in the effort of creating and maintaining a healthy and prosperous consumer market, and for that reason it has developed the SOLAF service (Arabic word means TALK) that allows the public to provide a suggestion or lodge a complaint regarding any violation to the consumer rights. PACP is also keen on developing a prosperous eParticipation practice that brings the public closer to PACP allowing them to work together to protect consumer rights. This is why the SOLAF service employs social networks, web 2.0 tools, and mobile apps to keep the consumers engaged in different ways and mediums, provide timely feedback, and promote transparency. The SOLAF service provides PACP with an important tool to monitor the market and provide a healthy environment for the consumers and ensure their satisfaction. In addition to that, SOLAF helps in making decisions by using consolidated reports of Big data collected from complaints/notifications and notifications from consumers along with BI tools.

• Providing eParticipation through different channels which includes ePortal, Mobile App, and Social Media channels in order to provide the consumer with a satisfactory and consistent service. • Collect regular feedback and response from consumer to improve PACP eServices. • Involve consumers in the decision making process to enable PACP to make informed decisions. • To work more efficiently for consumer protection from price fluctuations. • To develop consumer general awareness and use proper scientific means to spread it on accurate and balanced bases in the society as a whole. • To find prompt solutions to consumer complaints/notifications. • Help authority to Take appropriate measures to stabilize markets • Make consumer aware of misleading advertisements and the role of the Authority in fighting them • Receive complaints/notifications from consumers and consumer societies, help in investigate them and find appropriate solutions. • Continuously follow up commercial activities, monitor movement of goods and services and make sure of availability of basic goods. • Helps in Encourage fair competition, combat forfeiting and the monopoly harmful to the national economy. • Helps in researches and studies on consumer protection by providing a big data and proper BI tools. • Helps in improving implementation of consumer protection laws and regulations.

The SOLAF has been developed with understanding to promote transparency, avoid monopoly by forming Anti-monopoly and competition center. Additionally, bring innovation in the consumer market / society by devoting competent team for R&D and Implementation department. With the help of big data generated through SOLAF initiative and the assistance from R&D department, PACP has managed to convince Oman government to: 1. Optimize the articles of the law to reduce the number to recurrent violations due to gaps in the law. 2. Promulgation of Anti-Monopoly of law to promote fair competition in the market. This enables the government to establish Antimonopoly center inside PACP. 3. Improve the consumer protection law to optimize the process of accommodating complaints/notifications related to other ministries e.g. Municipality. To smoothen process for consumer. One of the target of SOLAF initiative is to fight discrimination and promotes equality. Consumers can lodge complaint and raise notification Irrespective of their gender, age, nationality and resident status by using mobile app, website, hotline etc. SOLAF initiative promotes collective responsive wisdom through different channels including social media (Facebook, twitter, Google+, Instagram). In addition to that, a report has been generated every fiscal year to make sure 100% of the reported complaints/notifications have been resolved.

The eParticipation practice allows consumers to provide their input through the trending interactive channels and provides consumers with: - Equal rights: Consumers irrespective of their gender, can lodge a complaint electronically from anywhere at any time through one of the different channels they are accustomed to. - Justice to people: SOLAF initiative Promote peace, justice and equality of people in different societies, irrespective of their gender, race nationality they can lodge a complaint through SOLAF and PACP make sure justice is being done. - Healthy environment: The practice promotes a healthy consumer environment where consumer rights are protected and the consumer community is educated. Through the SOLAF service recall, warning and its eComplaint practice, PACP is able to protect the consumers from scams. A sample of some chewing tobacco recently being ceased as a result of this practice and PACP's efforts can be found in the supporting documents. - Fair share of important good: PACP through awareness program educate people to buy only what is their need to make sure people don’t have more than their fair share of important goods, like food. These awareness messages has been spread through different channels of SOLAF including, email, push and SMS notification.

Following are the list of Problems which stakeholders were facing before Existence of SOLAF initiative. - Low Reach: Consumer use to travel to Hypermarket / stores physically to know about the prices of products. - Complaint Logging and Follow-up: Consumers used to take several hours to log complaint with PACP as they have to travel physical to the regional offices. - Society Development: The development of society as a whole was require to overcome corruption, encourage nation development, avoid monopoly and promote transparency. The PACP SOLAF initiative has done a tremendous job in overcoming the challenges and has achieved the stated objectives by resolving above stated problems. - High Reach: When PACP engages the consumers they become its eyes in the market acting like its agents in inspecting and monitoring the market conditions - Increased Mobility: Consumers can lodge a complaint electronically anytime anywhere through the SOLAF services. Additionally, consumer can check status and do follow-up on his previous complaint which saves their time and reduce cost. - Reduce gap: The SOLAF initiative helps in reducing gap between society and decision makers with proper channels in placed including mobile App, hotline and mobile office.

The SOLAF initiative eParticipation practice involves the consumers themselves in one of the issues that matter the most to them and that affects them in their daily lives, which is maintaining a healthy consumer market. Consumer satisfaction is integral to the eParticipation practice as its main objective is to allow the consumers to sound their dissatisfaction against issues in the consumer market. The ever-growing number of new and returning consumers lodging complaints/notifications proves that the practice is achieving what the consumers expect and that they regard it as the way to retain their rights. Consumers’ satisfaction increases when they know that PACP is protecting their interests and resolving their complaints/notifications. In addition to that, Consumers are raising complaints directly to hypermarkets / vendors under the supervision of PACP by using Tawasul feature of SOLAF. There are 16711 consumer complaint in 2016 and 18065 consumer complaint in 2017, which is more than 1500 consumer complaints/notifications on average per month. As compared to last year which accounts for a 7.5% increase in the volume of complaints/notifications lodged. Consumers are realizing that working collaboratively with PACP is retaining their rights and a prosperous consumer market!

The SOLAF has been developed with understanding to promote transparency, avoid monopoly and bring innovation. - Nearest Retail Outlet: The SOLAF provides a very unique feature for the user to select the price of any commodity item and then can check the nearest retail outlet which is selling a particular product. - Management Planning and Organizing Monthly expense Planner: The app provides facility for the user to manage and organize the monthly expenses. The expenses are organized in different categories and sub-categories. The expenses can be added directly or through the Price Checker module. The app also provided recommended percentage of expenditure for certain category. - International Prices: Integration with Reuters has been done to extract international prices of commodity items. This enables side by side comparison on local/international commodity prices. - Special Mobile App for Kids: A special Mobile App, Young Consumer, has been launched. Purpose of this application to improve children awareness by fun and play. These measures has been taken to improve the society by focusing on Children who are the future of the country. - Recalls and Warning Service: This service has been included in SOLAF to promote awareness and protect consumers from scams and their rights.

Oman’s consumers’ protection initiative with its SOLAF initiative is the first of its kind in the GCC. PACP’s primary objectives are to protect the market from price fluctuations, guarantee fair treatment, honesty and credibility, develop consumer general awareness, find prompt solutions to consumer complaints/notifications, and fight counterfeiting, swindling and monopoly. In addition, PACP aimed to develop a sustainable downstream chain to support Oman’s thriving consumers’ market and protect consumers’ rights. PACP strongly believes that providing an efficient, transparent and satisfactory service to the consumers can create a healthy and a prosperous consumer market. Therefore, it strives to protect consumer rights and promote awareness effectively. Ultimately, PACP empowers the consumers and engages them in the effort to create and maintain a healthy and prosperous consumers’ market. The core of PACP customers’ protection philosophy is customers’ feedback and complaints/notifications. These feedbacks provide the basis on which PACP can provide quality services to the consumers. PACP leverages on information technology and pervasive mobile technology through the SOLAF initiative which encompasses the whole business process and system architecture to empower the consumers through which they can lodge complaints/notifications, provide feedback and suggestions concerning any breach to the consumer rights from anywhere at any time.

With the formation of PACP 5 April 2011. At the same time, the authority works very hard to operationalize the organization and reach out to the consumers. PACP recognizes that the consumer is the first defense line in implementing consumers’ protection; hence it spent resources and efforts to step up on educating the consumers. Through education, consumers become the agents in the market. The authority’s effort is not only limited to the protection of the consumer as individual, but it benefits the trader too. By providing the traders with the information about product’s price in different places around the world, they would be able to price their products competitively. SOLAF started off with 515 team member with only 1 main branch. Today, SOLAF has a team of about 850 team members all over the Sultanate. They are now serving 11 provinces of Oman. SOLAF is a fully funded government initiative. Its budget to implement, Maintain, support, operate and improve rose from about OMR 3 million (USD$7.8 million) in 2011 to OMR 10 million (USD$ 26 million) in 2018. With the mandate, technical and manpower resources, PACP consequently succeeds in creating a symbiotic relationship between the consumers and the traders.

Yes

Oman’s consumers’ protection initiative with its SOLAF Initiative is the first of its kind in the Middle East. Consumers’ sovereignty reign supreme in the sultanate after decades of limited consumers’ protection. Through the use of pervasive mobile and information technology, the public is empowered to bring to light malpractices and issues which infringe consumers’ rights. PACP also plans to improve integrative eServcies with other government entities such as Muscat Municipality and the Ministry of Commerce and Industry to automatically get contact details, GPS coordinates, owner details, license details, and other relevant details of vendors. This will facilitate the PACP action team in response to consumer’s complaint or report. The experience gained by PACP in implementing the world class services in SOLAF is transferrable and can be used by any other organization inside Oman or internationally. An agreement has already been signed with an Egyptian authority for the replication of same experience and services in Egypt, as well as some Arab countries including UAE and Tunisia. The PACP efforts are recognized by international bodies and has been granted “Best Six Practices in the World” award by Consumer International. The implementation details has been shared with Consumer international which is working on to implement the same practices in different part of the world.

With proper system and process in place, the consumer protection initiative in Oman is sustainable and would benefit the public even more in the long run. Its sustainability is bolstered by the regulatory acts and related policies that have been put in place to enforce consumers’ protection rights. With pervasive public awareness programme at major events, trade shows and traditional media channels, all consumers are educated on their rights for better services and quality consumer products. PACP through its master plan continues to reach out to the consumers, and to increase the number of commodities that should be monitored to publish their price so that a wider range of price index is available through the mobile application. PACP also plans to improve integrated eServices with other government agencies such as Muscat Municipality and the Ministry of Commerce & Industry to facilitate the PACP team to form a swift response to consumer’s complaint or notifications. On top of this, the following factors will ensure the sustainability of the project. - Environment: with the PACP app, website, call center consumer can use all the services at finger tips. This ensures reduced pollution due to less travel/petrol burning. - Social impact and organizational benefit: The SOLAF initiative is promoting social justice by providing transparent, efficient and meticulous process for complaint logging and follow-up. The process simplicity has enabled PACP to concentrate more on services delivery to promote consumer satisfaction. - Economical aspect: PACP is a fully funded government entity. Its budget to implement, Maintain, support, operate and improve rose from about OMR 3 million (USD$7.8 million) in 2011 to OMR 10 million (USD$ 26 million) in 2018.

The SOLAF initiative has been designed, developed and published keeping long term vision and future sustainability for both PACP and Consumer. Following are the factors which will ensure the sustainability of the project. - Chat with PACP Inspectors: After forwarding complaint to PACP, it’s assigned to PACP inspector for further investigation. Inspector has to call consumer(s) for further information. Through this feature both can interact with each other and reduce the complaint process cycle. To formalize this process a team of 4 people from IT and complaint department is working. - Integration with eShopping sites: To provide facility for the user to do online shopping from the e-Portal through the prices which has been extracted through auto-integration and also enables PACP to monitor prices which will avoid monopoly, price control and optimum services for consumers. An enthusiastic team of 3 people from media and IT department is working day and night to make it happen. - Supplier benchmarking through consumer feedback: Develop a systematic mechanism inside the SOLAF to do supplier benchmarking based on user feedback to increase competition for quality and improved services. - R&D/innovation department: R&D is a crucial component of innovation and a key factor in developing new competitive advantages in a changing world. PACP devoted a new department named, R&D/Innovation Department, which come up with innovative ideas to keep SOLAF sustainable. - Improve shopping experience: R&D department has come up with new idea which is currently in the implementation phase. It educates consumer to check the previous history of all cases lodged with PACP related to the same product he/she going to procure so as to enable him/her to make informed buying decisions. Management support: PACP management believes in the impact of technology. Since start of the initiative a dedicated team is constantly working to improve SOLAF.

Yes

Key Performance Indicators are used to evaluate the impact and effectiveness of the SOLAF Initiative, and PACP has employed different mechanisms to collect feedback: - The feedback from consumers, employees, other government entities and Vendors to assess the SOLAF usability and their satisfaction of the services offered. - Statistical data about Number of Complaints/Suggestion/notification logged through the portal/Mobile App/Call center, Number of Portal visits/Number of Mobile App Downloads, No. of time Price index used, No. of Emailing list users, Number of awareness videos viewed. - Benchmarking the portal/Mobile App with regional similar portals/Mobile Apps. PACP has published online survey and opinion poll on the website where consumer can provide his feedback about PACP portal and the allied services. In addition, regular surveys are conducted on Facebook about SOLAF, the services and its content for further improvement. The statistics show the effectiveness of portal and KPI’s measureable data: - 529,000+ portal visits - 100,000+ Price index and follow-up Request - 1200+ Average Daily portal visitors - 7,000+ Complaints lodged on the portal - 1,000+ Suggestions provided on the portal Consumers’ satisfaction increases when they know that PACP is protecting their interests and resolving their complaints/notifications, as shown through the testimonials by Facebook and newspaper from consumers.

The SOLAF has become a pillar supporting PACP’s work and enabling it to advance and improve. Following list of features has been implemented through direct response from Consumers. Complaint against PACP: Consumers can lodge a complaint against PACP in case they were not satisfied by the actions taken or mistreated online or by a representative. Dedicated Section for Kids and Special Mobile App for Kids: A special dedicated section has been provided for the kids in the e-Portal and a Special Mobile App, Young Consumer, has been launched. Purpose of this application to improve children awareness by fun and play. Noteworthy Complaints: Important complaints are published in a blog-like feature and consumers can share the complaints on their social media profiles. The complaints are chosen by the complaints department and published by the media department Complaint of the Week: Every week, a noteworthy complaint is chosen by the media department and featured on the portal’s main page and PACP’s social media accounts. This exposes important complaints and encourages more consumers to participate. SOLAF help PACP to fill gap in existing law and convince government to optimize those articles. Promulgation of antimonopoly law to promote fair competition in the market.

Continuous effort is made to enhance the SOLAF in terms of content, structure and user-experience facts. For this several web-analytic metrics are measured in real-time. In addition periodic statistics are compiled, surveys are conducted and their results direct further actions of the SOLAF team. Following are the list of KPIs through which the performance, usability and reach has been measured: 1. Average Services Requests Per day: 2. User Comments/Suggestion from the e-Portal: 3. Average Throughput and response time for each service request 4. No. Of complaints/suggestion/notification generated from the different channels 5. Surveys are launched to measure Consumer feedback and opinion. For example view screen shots of the Consumer Satisfaction Survey that is currently active. The results of previous survey are also available for download in PDF, Excel format. Survey results are exported to IBM SPSS and Survey results are used as inputs by design team while considering portal enhancement. 6. In addition public opinion is sought via feedback through Polls, Page content ranking service, etc., in addition to social media direct feedback.

The main stakeholders are the Chairman, Core business, IT, media and legal departments of PACP. Apart from PACP some of the other ministries of Oman are also stakeholders including Public Prosecution, Royal Oman Police, Muscat municipality and MOCI. PACP developed and implemented the SOLAF initiative to solicit, register, collate and resolve all complaints/notifications. The entire system is supported by customer services, and vendors are sharing prices of their products with PACP in order to make consumer market better day by day. The nature of PACP’s role is very consumer centric and for that even high levels of management are directly involved in consumer matters: - Directors from All relevant PACP Department: Directly involved in handling complex complaints by either offering consultancy in specific affairs (as in legal affairs for example) or personally handling complaint resolution. - Oman Public Prosecution (OPP): some cases are forwarded to OPP in the complaint resolution process wherein PACP cannot issue/implement the judgment due to the limitation in the current consumer protection law. SOLAF plays a vital role to make this process smoother through its integrated services with OPP. - Royal Oman Police (ROP): ROP has been connected to the integrated ecosystem of SOLAF to help PACP implement judicial orders and arrest warrants. - Muscat Municipality (MM): Some of the cases received by PACP are related to MM which are being forwarded to MM after careful study and analysis. This was a manual and hectic process before initiative of SOLAF. SOLAF is integrated with ministry of commerce and industry to get official data of vendors. PACP’s documented business processes describe how each level of management is involved and how escalation is handled. Furthermore, the involvement of management is supported by a powerful reporting system allowing close monitoring of complaints/notifications.

1) The importance of team structure in all stages of initiative’s design, implementation, support, operation improvements and enhancement. Stakeholders and top management involvement is the key factor of success. Ignorance of any stakeholder can cause failure to the initiative. 2) IT skills of societies are developing day by day as and when technology evolved and subsequently they expect more from government to improve their services. 3) Laws, policies and procedures need to be reviewed and changed to adopt changes and improvement of technology, society and lifestyle. 4) The importance of e-participation in decision making: It is very important for the modern society that government should be closer to the society and exchange information, Ideas and suggestions. Government has to do continuous efforts and investment to implement latest technology trends to implement those ideas/suggestion. 5) Transparency, fair competition and healthy market place will rise economy of the country. It will encourage honest traders to earn and invest more in the market. And consumer feeling safe will encourage them to shop easily. 6) Pervasive public awareness program is essential for PACP to educate the market about their rights. This enables the consumers to detect any fraud or violations and report them directly to PACP.