The Social Security Administration offices in Cleveland have received an upgrade this week.
Patrick Goins Jr., a Cleveland native now working with Avaya Government Solutions, had workers take out the old phone lines in the building and replace them with a new system. ...
The new system uses Enterprise Voice over Internet Protocol technology.
“What was a completely independent system is now a network within the Social Security Administration that they own,” Goins said. “They don’t have to pay long distance or call charges. It’s basically run at almost no cost to them.”
Additionally, the interlinked system means that if there are ever problems at a particular office, calls can easily be re-routed to other offices. ...
This process also works in situations where hold times are long. If an office is experiencing a huge number of calls and is having to keep people on hold for a long period of time, calls can be quickly sent to another office.
Feb 1, 2011
But What If Other Offices Are Also Getting Lots Of Calls?
From the Bolivar Commercial:
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6 comments:
I am a Disability Benefit Specialist in Wisconsin and wonder if this will present problems with releases. I have run into problems where a SSA 3288 form was faxed to a field office and ended up on someones desk. If I end up talking with a different field office there may be a delay in receiving information if that 3288 never made it to the clients file.
It costs so little because it works so poorly. This project looked good on paper but works awful in practice.
Some big dope looking to make himself/herself look good. In reality all they did was get us the Hugo of phone systems. Dope.
So they get transferred to another office where no one has any idea what's going on with their claim, and can't make any inputs anyway because the claim is owned by the original office. Great!
Oh, this is priceless. Auto transfer a call from one office with too few bodies to answer the phones to another office with too few bodies to answer the phones.
The whole VOIP project should have taught SSA a lesson on crappy phone systems. Once again, "doing more with less". I'd like to see OIG actually do some real work and investigate how all these contracts are awarded. If not, get a Congressman to call in GAO.
The system is so great that the company that developed it (Nortel) when bankrupt.
Way to pick another looser, SSA....
Have we ever had telephone systems that worked since they pulled the old hardwired phones out of the wall? I called a friend's office the other day and the automated answer was unintelligible. So, I sent him an email and he had to call me. Oh, and there's no such thing as a phone system that doesn't cost anything. I hear you can't fix problems yourself, and messes with extensions and so on never get fixed. Just great. Yeah, another great "We don't need more people! Let's automate it!" idea. Feh.
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