In the past, Social Security collected data on how well it was able to answer its 800 telephone number, calculating an agent busy rate -- the percentage of callers who receive a busy signal. That percentage for fiscal year 2019 was 14.1%. However, it appears from their recently posted numbers that they're either answering almost all of their calls or their system for tracking busy signals has broken down almost completely. I suppose it's also possible that their system is now set to keep ringing for a set number of minutes before just cutting off the caller and they're pretending that's not a busy signal. In any case, I'm pretty sure the recent numbers they've posted bear no reasonable relationship to caller experience. For the sake of completeness they post their 800 number speed to answer numbers as well but you can easily make those numbers look better just by hanging up on people more quickly.
The published numbers on field office telephone service aren't so obviously fishy but they also seem way off from what I and my clients have been experiencing.
DO numbers for 2020
ReplyDelete2020,January,80.12%,5.95%
2020,February,82.38%,4.82%
2020,March,85.36%,3.54%
2020,April,96.15%,0.57%
2020,May,96.02%,0.68%
2020,June,94.11%,1.73%
2020,July,93.40%,1.92%
2020,August,92.34%,2.28%
2020,September,90.45%,3.20%
For July 2021
2021,July,77.56%,6.12%
So they are telling us that in the first months of the shutdown, they were answering over 95% of the calls and last month they were down to 77.56%.
Sorry, Charles, those numbers look plenty fishy to me.
I think they must have gotten a vocational expert to give them the numbers.
Many years ago I worked a a teleservice center. They tracked how many calls we took a day, and how long we spent on each call. As if spending more time with a caller was a bad thing. I can't imagine the tracking is less sophisticated now.
ReplyDeleteThey are working with ten year old technology and going nowhere fast to replace it.
ReplyDelete