SSA has made or is in the process of making several initiatives aimed at reducing customer wait times in its offices. Image: The Image Party/Shutterstock.com
By: FEDweek StaffThe SSA has been carrying out several changes designed to improve in-person customer service but “has not developed processes to measure the effectiveness of reducing customer wait times in its offices,” says an inspector general report calling on the agency to perform such tracking.
Further, the SSA did not set goals specific to wait times for customers in the office or the time customers must wait for scheduled appointments, it said. “Without goals, we believe there is a risk of SSA customers experiencing prolonged wait times in receiving service when visiting offices or through scheduled appointments,” said a report done at the request of the bipartisan leaders of the House Ways and Means Committee.
The report said that SSA has made or is in the process of making several initiatives aimed at reducing customer wait times in its offices, since restoring full in-person service at its field offices and card centers in early 2022 following two years of very limited services due to the pandemic. Those include check-ins on mobile devices, installing new and updated self-check-in kiosks, the availability to upload documents remotely, and a triage system for dealing with issues that can be resolved quickly on first contact vs. scheduling appointments for those that will require longer interviews.
In site visits to 76 offices, auditors found that the fastest method, from time of entering the building until being seen, was through checking in on the kiosks—39 minutes, compared with 50 or more minutes for employee assistance or other methods such as issuing pre-printed passes to customers waiting in line before an office opens.
Staffing at those offices is slightly below the pre-pandemic level of nearly 28,000, it added, but those numbers don’t reflect that several thousand of those employees leave each year and the challenges of training their replacements to carry out complex duties. Seventy percent of managers that auditors interviewed said their offices do not have sufficient staff to handle the workload.
“Failure to retain and transfer institutional knowledge may result in increased staff turnover and further loss of knowledge, translating into higher costs and potential degradation of customer service,” it said.
Agency management agreed with a recommendation to capture data that measure the effectiveness of customer service initiatives but only partially agreed with one related to setting customer service goals. The IG in turn reiterated that recommendation.
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