In January 2022 alone, the call centers received about 5.7 million calls, after receiving an average of about 443,000 per month for May through October of 2021.īut the recent surge isn’t the first time callers have had difficulty getting through to a human. Another option is to rapidly increase staff - which is difficult - or outsource some of the calls to a contractor, which is costly and requires training, said Dawson. But, he said, that approach is less effective if people are calling with questions unique to their specific situation. One strategy centers can use when faced with an increase in volume is to give callers more information, either online or in an automated message, so that they can get their question answered without talking to a human, Dawson said. Some call center surges are predictable Black Friday, for example, is likely to be extra busy for retailers.Ĭall centers should also be able to handle unexpected surges, at least of a certain scale, “without going to pieces,” said Keith Dawson, vice president of Ventana Research, where he leads customer experience research.īut, when it comes to a more than twelve-fold surge in call volume, like the employment department experienced, “there’s no possible way that they can be prepared for something of that magnitude,” said Dawson. The vast majority of those calls, Lacy said, were regarding disability benefits. In January 2022 alone, the call centers received about 5.7 million calls, after receiving an average of about 443,000 per month for May through October of 2021, according to data the department provided to CalMatters. Meanwhile, the number of calls to the disability insurance branch call centers, which also handle paid family leave, was swelling. In January, the department said it had suspended approximately “27,000 suspicious medical provider registrants and 345,000 claims associated with those providers or other suspicious activity.” To confirm the identities of claimants and doctors, staff sent out emails and letters, he said. The disability branch also borrowed 133 employees from other branches of the department, and brought back nine retired employees to help with the additional work, according to Lacy. That’s ten times the normal monthly overtime average, according to Lacy. To sift through the influx of claims, verify medical provider and claimants’ identities, and answer an uptick in calls, the roughly 1,000 staff in the disability branch worked 22,000 hours of overtime per month from December 2021 to May 2022. Your guide to the 2022 general election in California Typically, the department received 70 new medical provider registrations per week, but during four weeks from late November to early December, they received about 30,000, Lacy wrote in an email. The agency had experienced a massive surge of new medical provider accounts and suspected many were fraudulent, said department spokesperson Gareth Lacy in an interview with CalMatters. In December, the department said it was taking action to halt “suspected organized criminal elements filing false disability insurance claims.” California’s disability insurance replaces some wages for people who are unable to work due to illness, injury, or pregnancy, and medical providers certify the existence of a disability. She thinks she’s still owed $168, but, she said in a June interview, “now I feel like I’ve just given up.” Employment department flooded with calls She sent the form and documents the next day, she said. In February, Cedillo got a letter from the department asking her to fill out a form and send back documents to verify her identity. “And then to not even have that - and I was depending on that - was really, really frustrating.” “I had budgeted for this and I knew that I was going to not get very much from the state anyways,” said Cedillo. Without wages coming in, Cedillo put more charges on her credit card. That’s down from about 80% between May and October of 2021. Less than half of unique phone numbers calling the Employment Development Department’s disability insurance branch call centers were answered on average between November 2021 and April 2022, according to department data. She would sit and redial, often while nursing, sometimes 40 times in one day. When they didn’t, Cedillo estimates that she called the department between 300 to 500 times in late 2021 and early 2022. The worker she reached said many payments had been delayed due to fraud, but that they should restart soon, Cedillo recalled. She couldn’t find anything on the department’s website that explained why, so she started calling.
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