Unemployment Insurance Call Center Modernization

Working with the Department of Labor, the Office of Innovation built a new call center system that can handle greater call volume, while drastically reducing wait times and freeing up agents to answer more difficult questions. This ongoing work is part of the Resident Experience Initiative.

Challenge

The NJ State Department of Labor’s legacy call center system could leave residents frustrated and State employees overwhelmed. At peak times, residents seeking help with their Unemployment Insurance benefits faced long hold times or had to call repeatedly, while the busiest call center representatives had to manage hundreds of calls a day.

Innovation In Action

In partnership with the NJ State Department of Labor, OOI moved the Department to a newly built cloud-based call center system that provides critical data and insights as well as more flexibility in creating menu options in both plain language English and Spanish. With this data, State officials are able to understand why residents are calling and create self-service menu options and tools in response to frequently asked questions, so callers can find the information they seek and answer their own questions. This reduces wait times and increases the number of unique callers who can speak with an agent.

Impact + Metrics

The new call center has enabled the Department of Labor to serve over 60,000 additional residents per year, while slashing hold times and saving hundreds of thousands of dollars over the next several years due to increased operational efficiency.
Callers can now get information about their claim status through an automatic status update tool rather than waiting to speak to an agent.
The success of this work has spurred several agencies to partner with OOI to modernize their call centers. Using this initial project as a guide, OOI developed an approach that can be replicated with greater speed and efficiency with additional call centers. As of April 2024, six call centers including the ANCHOR property tax program, Temporary Disability and Family Leave, and Unemployment Insurance have been modernized enabling them to efficiently manage over 4.3 million calls in their first year.

Status

The Unemployment Insurance call center system is regularly updated using agile development, which continuously introduces improvements.

Partners

NJ State Department of Labor
NJ State Office of Information Technology

Last updated on 7/29/24