Florida DEO cuts ties with call centers

Jobless agency said it was poor performance, emails said lack of funds

The Florida Department of Economic Opportunity, which since the coronavirus pandemic erupted has handled unemployment claims from nearly 2.5 million people, has fired two of its call center providers that were helping jobless residents.

DEO said the companies were fired for poor performance, but emails sent to employees said it was because of a lack of funding.

The agency terminated contracts with Los Angeles-based AECOM and Miramar-based United Data Technologies, firms that together had been providing about 1,000 customer service representatives to help answer the non-stop calls streaming into DEO.

AECOM, which the DEO contracted with on April 24 for $24.7 million, had been providing about 800 agents for the state. UDT, which started working with the DEO on April 8 for $12.4 million, supplied 155.

Tiffany Vause, a spokeswoman for the DEO, confirmed the cuts Tuesday night after screenshots of emails from the axed companies began to surface online. Letters from the DEO show that the contracts were severed last week.

The DEO still has active contracts with Titan Technologies, a company headquartered in the Panhandle, and Faneuil, located in Hampton, Virginia. There are also some in-house call reps employed by the DEO.

In all, Vause said about 3,000 customer service representatives remain to field calls.

Vause said the DEO chose to end contracts with some of its vendors “who are not providing as high quality services” in favor of keeping on other companies “who have provided higher skilled and fully trained representatives.”

In letters sent to the companies on July 9 and July 10, Ruth Dillard, DEO’s director of workforce services, wrote that, “DEO has determined that it is in the best interest of DEO and the state of Florida to terminate the contract.” The letters followed verbal notices that were given a few days prior.

Emails sent to affected employees at the companies, however, said the cuts were not because of performance.

One email that appears to have come from Plexos, a subsidiary of AECOM, faulted an “unanticipated lack of continued funding for the re-employment call center operations.”

Another email that appeared to come from AECOM said, “The state has assured us this is in no way attributed to our performance on this contract. It is our understanding that funds they anticipated receiving simply did not become available to continue operating as planned and they are having to make similar difficult decisions with the other vendors as well.”

A spokesperson for UDT via email reiterated that the company “has been continuously reassured that performance is not the reason for the termination.” A spokesperson for AECOM did not address the reasoning behind DEO’s decision. Neither company said whether it would lay off employees who had been working as call reps.

Millions spent

The firings follow months of frustration for millions of unemployed workers who have struggled to navigate Florida’s wornout CONNECT website, the $77 million system purchased in 2010 to handle unemployment claims.

The situation escalated to the point that some of the country’s top Democratic legislators called for a federal investigation into the state’s “uniquely poor” handling of unemployment, blaming Republican Govs. Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis who they say ignored multiple audits of the system.

By mid-April, the DEO had processed less than 4% of submitted unemployment claims, prompting the state to spend more than $110 million in an attempt to modernize the flailing system and bring on more contracted employees to help with the flood of calls — more than it paid to first set up the CONNECT site.

So DEO inked new contracts with several call center service providers, including UDT and AECOM, as well as a $17.5 million contract with Faneuil and $79.9 million agreement with Titan Technologies. The DEO also has an ongoing $2.1 million, 15-month contract with Lighthouse Works, an Orlando customer call center operation that employs sighted and visually impaired

workers, to help take calls.

DeSantis also launched a mobile-friendly site and said that 72 servers had been added so CONNECT could handle more people on the system. About 2,000 state employees from other departments were also transitioned to process claims.

Although to date the DEO has paid out more than $10 billion to almost 1.7 million people, errors with the system persist. As of Monday, 244,286 claims had not been verified.

Hired to improve

Despite the added call centers, for many applicants, reaching a customer representative who can fix problems with claims has been nearly impossible.

Sarah Dawson, a 43-year-old independent contractor from Melbourne, was approved in April to receive federal PUA benefits, after she was disqualified for state benefits. But after receiving a few sporadic payments, the checks mysteriously stopped.

Dawson said she spent weeks calling state representatives, the governor’s office, Sen. Marco Rubio and the inspector general to try to get answers. The customer representatives at DEO she managed to get reach said the payments stopped because of a glitch or perhaps because her claim had been backdated, and that it would resolve itself or a supervisor would have to step in.

But no one she spoke with could fix the problem.

“You have to just call repeatedly to try to get someone, and then you find out that they really don’t have access to our claims. They really can’t do anything,” she said.

Dawson said it took emailing Ken Lawson, the former director of the DEO who was sidelined by DeSantis in April and replaced by Jonathan Satter, to get her claim pushed through. On Wednesday, she received about 12 weeks’ worth of the state compensation she was owed.

“I should not have to email the head of the DEO to get someone there to pay attention to my claim,” she said.

According to the call center contracts, in early March, calls to the DEO had increased to 27,000 per week and DEO answered only 2% of them. The average wait time to speak with an agent was 6½ hours. In late March, the number of calls spiked to 864,313 one week. The DEO answered fewer than 1%.

The contracts dictated the urgent need to increase the number of calls the DEO was answering, decrease wait times and the number of callers getting busy signals.

State Rep. Anna Eskamani, D-Orlando, whose office has been helping residents who can’t get through to call reps, was skeptical that DEO is being truthful about why it fired some call centers.

“Why are we communicating to Floridians that we’re cutting you from this team because of a lack of funding and then communicating to the greater public it’s because of performance. Which is it?” she said.

“It doesn’t feel grounded in reality that performance for any of the cell center contracts has been strong,” she said. “One of the biggest pains through all of this has been the lack of customer service, and I cannot stress that enough.”

“I should not have to email the head of the DEO to get someone there to pay attention to my claim.”

Sarah Dawson, who couldn’t get answers after her checks stopped