The pace of processing applications is only part of customer service; answering questions about that process and about benefits is the other major part. Image: Tyler Olson/Shutterstock.com
By: FEDweek StaffThe Biden administration’s President’s Management Agenda has three main elements, one of which is to improve customer service—the “customer experience,” to use the currently preferred term.
It recently held a government-wide customer experience day and it regularly posts on social media and on performance.gov about how this agency or that is improving this or that service to the public.
Fair enough; credit where credit is due. But shouldn’t customer service, like charity, also apply in the home?
Recently OPM made progress into reducing the backlog of retirement applications pending there. This was picked up and amplified by certain online publications that give those numbers—which change little month to month—the importance of puffs of smoke from a Vatican chimney.
OPM reposted links to those stories numerous times, for example highlighting that the average processing time in those reports of 70 days in September was down from 74 in August and 85 in July.
What OPM doesn’t stress is that the only reason it posts those numbers each month is Congress has required it for years, in reaction to complaints about the length of that process. To say that one goal is to shame OPM into doing better would not be too much of a stretch.
What OPM also doesn’t stress is that the average had been in the 65-71 range as recently as four months earlier in 2023, and that even the 70-day figure is 10 day above its goal. It also doesn’t stress that of applications that took more than the 60-day goal, the average time was more than twice that—122 days. Or that there are cases that drag on for many months beyond that, sometimes beyond a year or more.
While applications are pending, retirees receive only an estimated payment, sometimes far below their entitlement; while the difference is made up at the end, that is a real financial burden for many—not to mention the anxiety of waiting. That’s the origin of the complaints that members of Congress hear, and members of both parties have raised the issue to OPM in letters and in hearings again this year.
The inspector general’s office at OPM also gets such complaints and in a recent report on management challenges facing OPM noted for example that the pending case load remains above the 13,000 that OPM considers a “steady state” inventory. It also noted that the 60-day average goal was set more than a decade ago, with an initial target of achieving it by 2013.
The average processing time in September was 92 days, it added, and the inventory has remained “significantly higher” than the 13,000 goal for years.
“OPM needs to continue to work toward enhancing the retirement services customer experience . . . to ensure that the needs of its customers and stakeholders are met, and that retirees and their families are not waiting months to receive retirement benefits needed to financially support themselves and their families,” it said.
The pace of processing applications is only part of customer service; answering questions about that process and about benefits is the other major part. But the IG said, “The difficulties and frustration that OPM annuitants sometimes experience with long processing times can be matched with frustrations regarding OPM’s customer service when it comes to addressing these retirement issues.”
It said that in fiscal 2023 it received 76 percent more complaints than in 2022 over its hotline about problems with OPM’s retirement services. Most of the complaints “concern serious customer service deficiencies ranging from the inability to contact anyone through the retirement services customer service line to much longer delays in processing benefit payments.”
“Simply, there are too many calls with too few staff to answer and respond to those calls. OPM data shared with the OIG showed that for the 9-month period of October 2021 to June 2022, the agency received an average of approximately 26,000 calls a month but only managed to answer approximately 3,000 and had total customer contacts of about 5,700 per month,” it said.
The IG did credit OPM with steps such as issuing guides for applicants and employing agencies on how to make sure are complete and accurate before they reach OPM; launching an artificial intelligence chatbot able to address routine questions; and developing a modernized annuity calculator and an enhanced online retirement application system.
In the typically dry language of such reports, it said that whether customer service will truly improve even after those changes “remains to be seen.”
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See also
The Gift of Annual Leave for Federal Employees
Alternative Federal Retirement Options; With Chart
Primer: Early out, buyout, reduction in force (RIF)
Retention Standing, ‘Bump and Retreat’ and More: Report Outlines RIF Process
