VOIP No Substitute For Warm Bodies

From the minutes of the March 16-19, 2009 meeting of the Executive Committee of the National Council of Social Security Management Associations (NCSSMA), an organization of Social Security management personnel. The meeting included a session with Social Security Commissioner Michael Astrue and Social Security Deputy Commissioner for Operations, Linda McMahon:

TSRP/VOIP [Telephone Systems Replacement Project/Voice Over Internet Protocol] – The new equipment does little to help us answer phones more effectively. Nor does it revolutionize our service delivery. It would be helpful to be able to divert phone calls to another place, perhaps the TSC [Teleservice Centers, which are also overworked and would also like to offload some of their work to someone else]. We have a new phone system, which we have long needed; however, it does not enable the Field Offices to provide better public service. Human resources are still the answer to many of these issues. [Translation: We need more employees. to help us get our work done.] We continue to see more visitors despite Internet utilization. In addition, there is a tremendous amount of pressure to move Internet claims. Phone service is sacrificed. What will happen when we have VOIP reports to show where we really are in terms of not answering phones? Will we then have the same pressure we now have as a result of VIP [?] data? Metrics will only be one more thing to manage. We need, on average, at least two additional employees in each office just to be able to answer telephones. Quality is lacking in the clarity of our new telephone systems. ...

In many cases, VOIP provides less functionality than our old phone systems. For example, the paging feature is not available to all offices; only to those offices that were previously utilizing it. Both the Commissioner and Linda were surprised to learn of the problems we are having not only with VOIP but also with Nortel.

By the way, I am using VOIP technology in my office. There is nothing wrong with VOIP per se. It provides a clear cost saving advantage. However, in no way does VOIP substitute for warm bodies answering the telephone.