From The Sacramento Bee:
Trying to get through to Social Security on its 800 number? Be very, very patient. Wait times have been averaging roughly 35 minutes. In September, the latest data available, the average time on hold was 34.7 minutes. The shortest average wait so far this year came in May, 28.8 minutes. The longest was in March, 39.8 minutes. ...
Reps. Ken Calvert, R-Corona, and Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, have introduced the “Stuck on Hold Act,” which would require the Social Security Administration and Department of Veterans Affairs, which has also experienced customer service issues, to tell callers the estimated wait times. If the wait is longer than 15 minutes, the agency would give the consumer the option of receiving an automated call back when it is their turn in line. The agencies would have up to a year to put the new system into effect. ...
At Social Security, “We are doing what we can to improve phone service,” said Darren Lutz, an agency spokesman, who cited the hiring of new phone agents ... . The agency has moved to a new phone system, which Lutz said “allows us to receive more calls and provides callers with estimated wait times, and will soon provide an option for some callers to receive a call back instead of waiting in a queue. “ Social Security plans more improvements, he said, though ”to improve our phone service we will need sufficient and sustained funding.“ ...
Better ask Santa you have a better chance of funding there than with Congress.
ReplyDeleteIf ever available SSA should consider retired staff with a dual compensation waiver to cover phones. Limited training, especially for recent retirees. Could make a difference. It has been done before.
ReplyDeleteHa! No way in hell I would ever go back.
DeleteYou, my friend, are nuts. I left a year ago and it has been one of the best years of my life.
DeleteI would actually be happier if instead of a 2 minutes and 17 second introduction, they would just have a quick message: if you need direction press one and if you need a rep please press 2. ...
ReplyDeleteWhy would any retiree want to be part of the SSA Titanic? We have earned our retirement pay and are enjoying being as far away as possible from this agency. Management wanted a younger workforce that they can mold and they have gotten their wish.
ReplyDeleteWork in at TSC and they only gave limited ot due to budget to burn out fiscal year. Once it was gone, it was gone. Our ot is like once a year for very short period. We need more budget.
ReplyDeleteMore funding is needed for more timely service. Instead of a huge queue waiting for a person to answer they'll be an even bigger group waiting for someone to call back. Unreasonable workloads are just shifted and not learned.
ReplyDeleteThe must courageous thing O’Malley can do would be to reject most program integrity funds. Right now, the agency gets a couple of billion in PI funds that management relies on to prevent furloughs, closed offices etc. The problem is the agency has to do an insane amount of CDRs and RZs as a condition of getting the PI funding. Doing all this PI work delays all the other work, and here we are in the customer service crisis. While it would be painful for the employees to be furloughed, continuing down this same path every year is a vicious cycle. I’d rather the agency tell congress we can’t do all this PI work because we can barely do our basic work. I rather get furloughed and have offices close for part of the year because it would shine a light on how chronically underfunded SSA is and congress would finally get the blame they deserve and we might finally get a reasonable budget without all these strings attached. And by the way, 90% of CDRs are continuances so why do we continue to go over 500k of them when the DDS could use that time to catch up on initial claims? Again all due to the agency relying on this PI. It’s time to make the hard choice because continuing this way is nuts.
ReplyDeleteTreating an item taken from the Sacramento Bee on problems with the 800 number as breaking news shows a certain laziness in your reporting. It would be much better to find a real news source on this issue with relevant, historical information outlining reasons for problems rather than citing a news organization that is known more for reprinting stories from the Washington Post and similar media sources.
ReplyDeleteThis Bee article could have been better written by ChatGPT.
I KNOW A FEW FRIENDS WHO CAME BACK AS RETIRED ANNUITANTS. LASTED A FEW MONTHS UNTIL ABUSED BY NEWW JACK MGMT.READ AS RECENTLY MINTED O/S'S !!! MAY CONSIDER TO JUST FILL A DAYTIME VOID FOR A BIT DEPENDING ON ASSIGNMENTS. RETIREMENT FOR ME < 6 MONTHS. AM OPEN TO SUGGESTIONS !!
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