The Cleveland Plain Dealer has a second article today on the backlogs at Social Security. This one deals with Social Security's problems answering its phones. Here is an excerpt:
"They open at 8 o'clock, you start calling a couple of minutes before 8 and make sure you have a phone that has redial," says Dave Rybka of Chesterland, who waited for more than two years to get disability benefits.
"I just call, hang up, hit redial, hang up, hit redial. If you're not in by 8:05, you're done. During the day, I've found, I never got through."
this is refering to specifically local office's inability. The service area for most offices is fairly large in comparison to staff and it is only a small portion of the staff that can even take a phone call considering that most of the agents are claims reps that are doing strictly interviews etc. In the end it can end up being the Service Rep at the front desk answering both the calls and dealing with the people coming in. how is it possible to deal with both in person volume and phone volume. As far as the 1800 line is concerned the volumes are high as well from the time the phone opens up to the time the reps go home there can be 500 people waiting on just one node of the 20+ call center access points (read 50+) within the agency not including lightly trained payment center reps that come on the phone on high volume days. There is just no staffing to deal with the volume at any level period.
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