Exclusive Capita has told users of its ailing UK civil service pension portal to wait until new chatbots go live before contacting it again about problems.

In November 2023, the UK outsourcer was awarded a £239 million ($322 million) contract to run the Civil Service Pension Scheme (CSPS), which includes 1.7 million members and manages future pension benefits of around £189 billion.

The service went live on December 1 last year, greeting members with strings of errors and malfunctions. Unrecognized passwords and usernames, broken and circular links were among the problems while the website appeared unfinished and untested, with headers and other features displaying dummy text.

In an email to members dated December 17 – seen by The Reg – managing director Chris Clements said Capita was "working tirelessly to deliver the experience" they expect.

"New chatbots and ways to contact CSPS will be going live in the coming weeks. As such, if your enquiry is not urgent, we kindly ask that you wait until these go live in the New Year before contacting CSPS again. This will help us focus on delivering these improvements and ensure a smooth transition for all members," he said.

The email claims the service was "the largest ever transition of a public sector pension scheme to a new administrator going live on time."

In the future, Clements promised "one of the biggest services in the United Kingdom with AI at its core."

"By March, across CSPS, we will have introduced a raft of intuitive digital tools all aimed at giving you more transparency and control. A new Track My Case service in the portal will provide real-time visibility of your case's progression, while the new Retire Online will give support in planning and managing retirement more efficiently," Clements told members.

"As the service matures, further automation and AI will improve accuracy and speed, enabling you to access more information and complete more tasks online rather than over email or phone."

Service users taking to social media were bewildered by the response. "We don't need AI at the core of the website, we need it to function normally and not have placeholder text all over the place," one said on Reddit, summing up the reaction to the missive.

One source close to the discussion between the Cabinet Office – which awarded the contract – and Capita users told The Register that the system was likely to have been impeded in the early days of the launch. They said the volume of scheme members attempting to set up logins and view pension information "just to check" whether their details were correct was a contributing factor. Members have been advised to delay accessing the new portal until early spring when annual statements are due, unless they have a particular issue they wish to resolve or query.

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In an earlier statement, a Capita spokesperson apologized for any inconvenience caused during the launch. They said that after the blackout of the system in the last week of November, and the significant backlog inherited from the previous provider, Capita experienced several times the normal volume of contacts in the first two days of operations.

MyCSP ran the scheme on behalf of the Cabinet Office under a £238 million contract that was first agreed in 2012. MyCSP was a mutual joint partnership between employee partners, who owned 25 percent of the company, and a private sector partner, Equiniti. It took over from Capita, the previous provider, in 2016.

In December last year, public service union PCS said that the CSPS was getting support from Microsoft, one of the platform partners. Capita declined to provide further details. ®

Updated to add on January 6:

A Capita spokesperson told us: "We can confirm that over 83,000 members have now registered on the site. Registrations continue to increase rapidly."Due to the significant backlog inherited from the last provider, we have experienced several times the normal volume of contacts since launch.

"Capita has over 500 full time employees working to deliver the Civil Service Pension Scheme, an increase of 50 percent on the previous provider."