San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Agents struggle to aid jobless
Bureaucracy haunts representatives who answer angry, desperate calls
The angry callers are hard enough. After days of dialing and hours on hold, some scream and curse once someone finally answers.
But the despondent callers are much more wrenching. The woman who said her six children had not eaten in a day. The sobbing man about to be evicted. The woman who had lost her house to foreclosure. The family living in a car.
Those calls haunt claims representatives at California’s Employment Development Department.
“Sometimes I don’t know if I have the stomach for this,” said an EDD phone agent hired in the summer, who was granted anonymity in accordance with The Chronicle’s policy on confidential sources. “I get callers every week who are in the pit of despair and darkness.”
Millions of Californians, thrown out of work by shelterinplace guidelines that started one year ago, turned to EDD for unemployment bene
fits. The agency was quickly overwhelmed. EDD’s call center became notorious as a nightmarish bureaucracy that mired jobless people in Kafkaesque quests for help. Thousands upon thousands of jobless people said they couldn’t get the benefits they desperately needed.
For the EDD workers on the other end of the line, the interactions can be emotionally draining — especially for new agents hastily hired and limited in what they can do. They feel powerless to help people and resent having to put them on endless waiting lists for callbacks that may not occur.
Interviews with some of these agents, along with scathing reports by California’s auditor, paint a picture of inadequate training and inefficient systems. But some longertime workers see it differently, and EDD itself says it is working hard to change the culture under a new leader.
For the agent who’s been at EDD since the summer, the best moments are the rarest: when he can help a caller get benefits right away.
“This is what keeps me going,” he said. “I enjoy getting claimants their money. That’s why I joined. If I can do at least one of those a day, help someone concretely, that is worth the yelling, the screaming, cursing and berating.”
Working from home with an EDDissued computer/ phone system, he handles about 45 to 55 calls a day. Generally he can help between 10% to 20% with simple issues such as changing passwords, recertifying or fixing answers to intake questions.
But with many more, the issues are above his pay grade. It could be whether callers are eligible to receive benefits at all, or whether they previously collected some income from a pension or parttime job. It could be that everything seems in order— but the caller’s benefits still have not been released.
Ideally he should transfer people with thornier issues to a more experienced representative, called Tier 2 agents. But those agents are rarely available because there are far fewer of them and their expertise requires many months of training.
In such instances, he is supposed to tell callers that he’s putting them into the claim review process.
“We always tell claimants that claim review takes seven days,” he said. “I know that frequently that is not the case. I’m telling them what management tells me to say. Frequently we’re just kicking the can down the road. We put them on this endless waiting list where they do not get helped. They just keep calling and calling, and they’re locked in the black hole of claims review.”
Carie Mathis is one Californian trapped in that black hole. A single mom of 15yearold twins, she saw her unemployment benefits abruptly stop in December. She appears to be one of the 1.4 million accounts that the agency froze because of suspected fraud.
Mathis, whose cleaning business collapsed in the pandemic, lost her rental house in Rodeo and now bunks in the garage of her parents’ Vacaville home — “right next to my dad’s Harley” — so her twins (a boy and a girl) can have the spare bedrooms. She said she has spent untold hours on the phone and internet trying to get her benefits reinstated.
“Each phone call is a minimum of a twohour wait,” she said. “Once in a while you get lucky and get someone right away but that person doesn’t usually know what to do with you. You get some nice people on the phone, who do want to help, but still you get sent in a neverending circle like a hamster wheel. They say you need to call back during this particular time for a Tier 2 agent, but I would do that and still not end up with someone who knows what they’re doing.”
She’s scared of falling behind on payments for her car and a storage unit that holds all her possessions, and hopes that a GoFundMe will help with that. Earlier this month, she was chasing down the mailman, eager to get her $45 tax refund check.
“It’s allconsuming,” she said of trying to get help from EDD. “You’re hitting your head against the wall.”
That jibes with what the California state auditor, Elaine Howle, wrote in a January report titled, “EDD’s Poor Planning and Ineffective Management Left it Unprepared to Assist Californians Unemployed by COVID19 Shutdowns.”
As pandemic unemployment surged, “the call center effectively stopped providing service to almost all callers,” she wrote. From midMarch until late April, EDD answered an average of only 0.5% of total calls. Most callers dialed the agency at least 10 times — which added to the logjam. Even before the pandemic, EDD fell short of its goal to answer 50,000 calls a week. From January to midMarch 2020, it averaged 42,000 calls a week.
EDD rushed to hire new agents, but its performance barely improved.
In July, for instance, EDD received 50.3 million calls. Its agents answered 697,132 of them — just 1.4%, according to the auditor (numbers are rounded). Another 10.8% went to a selfservice line. By October, call volume was down to 3.6 million and EDD had 484 more agents, but it still answered just 230,301 calls, or 6.3%, the report said, although 46.2% went to a selfservice line.
At the same time, the agency “also failed to answer hundreds of thousands of questions claimants submitted online,” the auditor wrote.
Running a call center is not rocket science. Businesses and government agencies have evolved efficient practices over decades. Still, government call centers are notoriously inept. Other states have struggled to handle the massive surge in claims, although California’s problems are as outsize as its population.
As the auditor noted, EDD failed to adopt such wellknown measures as analyzing why people call, training agents on the most common questions and tracking if people’s issues are resolved on their first call.
From the IRS to Southwest Airlines, many entities let callers leave their numbers and/or schedule callbacks to avoid the frustration of lengthy waits on hold. EDD lost that ability when it adopted a new phone system in April that allowed agents to work from home.
EDD said in written responses to the auditor’s report that by May it will start analyzing why people call, and create ways to quickly train agents on frequently asked questions. It said it’s working to reinstate an automatic callback feature.
After 13 years at EDD, Irene Green, whose title is adjudicator, doesn’t have the same frustrations as the newbies. She has the experience and the expertise to assist almost every claimant lucky enough to reach her desk.
“For the most part, when they get to me, I can resolve their issues,” she said. She doesn’t know how many other representatives have the same kind of training and experience to be termed an adjudicator.
During the pandemic she’s been working up to 14 hours a day, seven days a week.
“Unfortunately the way the laws and policies govern unemployment, not everyone hired off the street can make decisions to get claimants paid,” Green said. Although she thinks EDD is trying hard to modernize, she agrees with the auditor’s criticisms but blames a tight budget for the agency’s issues. She does think EDD needs to assign even more people to the phones.
Green’s ability to help callers is so successful — and rare — that claimants share her contact information. “My name and number are circulated on social media, so I get a lot of calls that come outside the 800 number,” she said. “It’s good to know that people are happy with the services I’m providing, that they want to have others call me as well to get that same type of service, but I can be a little inundated. I try to help as many claimants as I can.”
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EDD has continued hiring to try to shore up the call center.
In early March, the agency said it had just finished training 251 phone representatives on complex tasks — giving them the ability to answer Tier 2 questions. It now has 3,436 agents taking calls, a huge boost from 1,270 in January 2020. It ducked questions about how many agents are Tier 1 and Tier 2.
Still, wait times average 40 minutes, it said. In the last two weeks of February it received 6.7 million calls, representing some 569,027 unique callers. It answered the vast majority of unique callers, 567,302, but the numbers show that most had to dial in an average of 12 times.
“We are aggressively working to fill positions and make sure we have proper staffing on board to help us in assisting customers,” said EDD Director Rita Saenz, who took over in late December when the previous head abruptly retired.
But teaching agents the complexities of unemployment regulations and EDD systems is a big bottleneck.
A year ago, the agency spent 10 to 13 months training new highlevel (Tier 2) agents,
Coronavirus update
CALIFORNIA VACCINATIONS doses administered
doses available Available doses given: 75.1% National average: 76.7% the auditor wrote. It sped that up to nine months during the pandemic. After three months some could take calls about claims filing but couldn’t answer questions about eligibility.
By contrast, the thousands of new “Tier 1” call center workers receive anywhere from one week to a few weeks of online training.
The new call center agent who spoke to The Chronicle anonymously said he’s applied for a promotion and additional training so he can help more people. Most of his training was prerecorded videos. “I would prefer live
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California training where I could ask questions,” he said. He has very little interaction with his bosses, other than online.
“The pandemic stressed the system and exposed a lot of the cracks and flaws,” said Yvonne Walker, president of SEIU Local 1000, which represents thousands of EDD workers. “They’re not staffed appropriately. A lot of people think you just throw someone in there and they can just push paper. It’s much more than that. It takes about a year of constant training to be fully equipped to do what they need to do.”
Even while it adds agents, EDD is experiencing a mass exodus. Since March 1, 2020, the agency has lost 1,633 regular workers and 652 intermittent workers, according to SEIU Local 1000.
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After one California woman lost her job last March, she applied for unemployment but hit the same brick wall as many others. She started jobhunting even though she was fearful of contagion from being around others.
So the $17/hour position as an EDD Tier 1 call rep seemed perfect: She could work from home, could even have her toddler around.
But after her one week of training via Zoom sessions, she soon realized that she was illequipped to help most callers.
“There are so many things we don’t have access to fix on their accounts,” said the woman, who asked not to be identified because she doesn’t want to lose the job. “It can take a long time — months (for them to get help). That was the hard part too, having to tell them that. When they get mad, I completely get that. Because I was in that situation too.”
The first thing most callers do is tell her how long they’ve been trying to reach a human being. “It could be months,” she said. “It could be that they’ve been on the line for three or four hours or all day.”
She hears about a stunning amount of hardship, including parents who are homeless with their kids.
“The worst time was around Christmas,” she said. “I had a lot of people calling saying they couldn’t buy their kids anything, couldn’t do anything for them, couldn’t pay their bills.”
She needs to send most calls to a Tier 2 specialist, “but that queue is closed probably 98% of the time” since the smaller numbers of those experienced agents are swamped, she said.
In that case, she’s supposed to tell callers that they are going into claim reviews and should hear back in seven to 10 days, which she knows is not true.
“I feel bad,” she said. “It’s pretty sad. I hope those people get their money. This is a hard job. I would not recommend it to anybody.”