From The Social Security Administration’s Telephone Service Disruptions, a report by Social Security's Office of Inspector General (OIG):
From The Social Security Administration’s Telephone Service Disruptions, a report by Social Security's Office of Inspector General (OIG):
Once again we went with the lowest bidder and our phone system sucks. To that you add poorly trained and overworked employees. We are the poster child for how not to run a federal agency.
ReplyDeleteI doubt it was actually the lowest bidder. Usually these decisions are based upon whichever vendor made the flashiest presentation filled with the most bulls**t about how their technology will save humanity and do everything better any mere human could do the job. These idiots would be funneling our budget into Moviepass and Elon Musk’s idiotic brain implants if they thought they could get away with it.
DeleteThe 14% abandon rate in April 2021 is telling twice over - it is just after the TSCs went 100% telework - and we were allowing 2 hours/day of overtime. Momentarily, we approached, but did not quite reach, an appropriate staffing level.
ReplyDeleteI don't get it. I work in an FO. Is this just laziness on the part of TSC. My standard response to a call is " what is the social security number you are calling about"..then what is your telephone number( in spite of caller ID ) in case we are disconnected. If that happens I call back.
ReplyDeleteI work in the FO but I started my career as a TSR; it isn’t laziness as much as TSR’s don’t have the autonomy we do in the FO. They are monitored very closely by their management. Taking a bathroom break longer than five minutes? Be prepared to have your supervisor waiting for you. Logged out of the queue? Your supervisor will certainly be walking over to see why within a minute or two.
DeleteIn this case, abandoned rates are calls where the customer terminated the call before they reached a TSR. We have the same metrics in the FO: overflow %, abandoned rate, busy rate etc.
Nice, so the new phone system is predictably and consistently bad -- whereas the old system had call drop rates that varied by 20+% within the same year. Amazing progress. Though I imagine the abandonment rate is also effected by lower staffing levels at SSA (anyone know whether the 800 number staffing has dropped compared to 2021?)
ReplyDeleteIs this really about "dropped calls?" Its abandoned calls. As I take that, its folks who got into que to be able to speak with a representative but then hung up before they ever had a chance to do so. Maybe it was of their own choice adfter sitting in que to 2 hours or maybe some of them were dropped by the system. The graph doesn't give any reasons the calls were abandoned.
ReplyDeleteI am not here to defend how SSA handles calls. I am just trying to clarify what it is we are talking about.
Correct. Abandoned calls would be calls where the person hung up while in the queue.
DeleteI have a hard time imagining any private business with the call response rate demonstrated by the SSA actually staying in business.
ReplyDeleteIt is past time to get rid of all of the operations staff at the Agency and bring in people that know how to run a public contact business who can clean out staff and start over. Enough is enough.
Are you joking? I can think of tons of massive businesses with equally bad phone systems, including Verizon, Comcast, and literally every student loan servicer and health insurance company I’ve ever dealt with. This race to the bottom (so our astronomically rich corporate overlords can hoard more money and keep buying more spaceships and political influence) isn’t at all confined to SSA.
DeleteName one private business that deals with everybody at one time or another. Sometimes even after you are dead. You can’t.
DeleteTrackable mail (sometimes certified) is how I communicate with SSA. Any change that can't be done online is done by trackable mail and post marked no more than 10 days after the change. I refuse to use that ridiculous phone system. I mean telecommunications is 150 year old technology, it seems one could get a telephone system right, even with low funding. I let them know in the correspondence that if they need to talk to me, to call me. I've never gotten a call yet (I know all the information they need and include it in the communications), and though it may be a month...or three, the change in circumstances eventually catches up.
ReplyDeleteI haven’t read the full report yet, but I’m interested to see if it provides any details or defines the difference between abandoned calls, where the caller gets tired of waiting and disconnects, and calls that the system terminated due to some glitch or other problem.
ReplyDelete@5:49
ReplyDeleteExactly my thoughts. I cannot think of a single US private business or another government agency that handles the call volume that SSA does. SSA has an INSANE amount of contact with the public. It's hard to believe any current infrastructure exists to handle the sheer amount of calls, without hiccups, that the agency gets daily/yearly. Not only that, but again, for the umpteenth time, SSA is so understaffed it isn't even remotely funny. Those two problems alone make the agency a customer service nightmare. Some of the issues with the agency fall agency leaderships shoulders, but they also can only do so much with the nightmare budget cuts they have been given by congress for the past decade. The hole that's been dug is so deep, SSA will continue to fight for years to just get out of the hole, let alone gain traction on tackling this issue head on.
2:36 and 9:02 Uh.No. The real answer for what is considered acceptable in the industry is around 5%.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.geckoboard.com/best-practice/kpi-examples/call-abandonment-rate/#:~:text=A%20low%20Call%20Abandonment%20Rate,easy%20for%20customers%20to%20understand.
friend called SSA 800 number to change address. Spent one hour and 20 minutes of which 5 minutes was to give info on address change for husband and wife.
ReplyDelete@ 3:20
ReplyDeleteIm not trying to be a smartass here, I am genuinely asking, name another agency/ single US business that receives 80-100 million calls a year and growing.
The volume is too high and SSA has no staff to answer. The staff which answer the phones are inadequately trained and not allowed to help thoroughly. The 800 # is just hot potato to the next person- field office or online.
ReplyDelete