Friday miscellany: overloaded call centers break things in specific ways
Also: my #1 SNAP policy pet peeve, and this week's screenshots
Overloaded call centers break things in specific ways
I caught the below post on /r/foodstamps this week, and it pointed to a couple different phenomena I know well for me:
Two separate things I want to unpack:
(1) There is really no recourse if you can’t get the (required) interview in SNAP — kind of a weird policy pothole!
(Note: this is my #1 SNAP policy pet peeve. If there’s recourse I’m not aware of, email me!)
SNAP has a required interview.1 Some see this as unnecessary burden, but I actually think it’s useful in lots of ways!
SNAP—more than some other programs—is complicated in its rules. 30-day income in particular is complicated. Compare that to, say, MAGI Medicaid, which can use tax year income, often available via electronic data pings. The need to get that income right means an interview can be really helpful.
In SNAP, an eligibility staffer walks through questions with a client on the phone, and that can be pretty helpful because they can explain questions on the fly if they’re difficult, clarify based on the specific situation, etc.
Also, since lots of information needs to be verified by submitting documents, often at the end of the interview, the worker can tell the client what specific documents they need to submit (rather than just a long list of maybe-needed docs.) Useful!
But… what if you miss your interview? Or what if you get a cold call for it, but you didn’t pick up because you were working? Or maybe your mailed notice of scheduled interview came after the interview date itself?
In that case, the process is generally that you need to call your agency to reschedule. Elsewhere, the default is that you call in to do the interview.
But here’s the problem — what if the call center is overloaded with calls?
Often you’ll get a deflection: that’s the technical term for a message that says “Sorry, we have too many callers right now. Please try again later.”
What if you call over and over again but only get that message?
Well…you’re going to be denied for not doing the interview.
You might think, well, Dave, that can’t be all that common.
And we don’t really know! Because systematically (as far as I’m aware, email me though!) there’s no reporting of denial reasons up to feds, and only a few states report it broken out by reason.
More specifically, a missed interview denial is called a “procedural denial” — meaning you weren’t denied because you were ineligible, you were denied because you didn’t complete the process.
This has become a big deal in Medicaid lately since they’re reporting it right now during “unwinding” and the (not great!) data is blowing minds. Who knew so many people got denied for procedural reasons!2
The one data point I do have comes from research published by my old team at Code for America, looking specifically at one large county in California:
Source: https://harris.uchicago.edu/files/homonoff_ppe_seminar_paper_5-3-23.pdf
33% were denied for missed interviews.
That’s not 33% of denials, that’s 33% of all applications!
So anyway, I’ve always thought this was an unfortunate seam in the system that people fall through. If you can’t get through to interview, you’re just, uh, kind of screwed.
And I sympathize with agencies here! If interviews are required, but you’re strapped for staff, it’s a bit of an intractable operational problem. (And this is one reason it was a very good decision to allow states to skip interviews during the overload of the pandemic — though that’s fading away now in many states.)
But there’s something else interesting here…
(2) Call center overload creates transaction-specific failure modes
What I find particularly interesting is we hear lots of complaints about call centers in public benefits. But when they get overloaded, it doesn’t just mean things are broken in general. It also creates transaction-specific failures.
What do I mean?
Any transaction that requires talking to someone on the phone is now structurally also overloaded and facing a high failure rate.
A lot of unemployment insurance (UI) agencies experienced this during the pandemic. Let’s say the following things require talking to a person on the phone to do:
Resetting your online account password
Certifying the first week of UI benefits
Doing an interview
Reporting a specific type of change
Doing some task in the online portal that is particularly complicated (so people call when they get stuck)
If the call center gets jammed up, any benefit business process that requires one of those tasks to be completed by a customer is now fundamentally throttled.
(Aside: this is one strong reason for prioritizing self service/portal improvements in years of relatively low workload — because when workload explodes and call centers are overwhelmed, now that 5% of people who call went from 5% of 1,000 to 5% of 10,000.)
And just moving staff to the call center doesn’t help this necessarily.
As, again, the pandemic UI experience showed us, there’s an operations Catch 22 here: the more staff you put on the call center, the fewer staff you have to process core workload.
And if getting behind on core workload causes more people to call, you can get into a self-reinforcing loop (also known to those who’ve lived through them as a death spiral.) Call center is overloaded, you move staff to answering calls, work gets behind, more people call, you move more staff over, you get more behind…3
This is also another good example of why a focus on customer experience also requires an operational model behind it — if you naively focus on one thing (wait times) and don’t look at the interrelationships, you can unintentionally do some real damage.
Screenshots from the week
As usual, no context.
Interviews have been allowed to be waived during the pandemic in many cases. This is a useful adaptation to a big environmental shock — if an app is close enough to complete to process, skip the interview (especially if the alternative is getting months behind in processing applications or renewals.)
I mean, I knew.
I personally would find it reasonable to consider retirement if I was getting yelled at over this.
Really helpful operational analysis! Illinois has a few failsafe rules (at the program level) for missed interviews that are good, though not always followed. I.e. multiple calls + written notice of appointment required before denial, AND, a very helpful rule that if you are denied a benefit, but present evidence on appeal contrary to the reason for the denial, the Department must accept the evidence as though it were presented along with the original application. This includes information that would have been given at a missed interview, which allows applicants the opportunity protect their full benefits. Appeals take time though, so the person would still be left without SNAP for some time. And if you don't have an advocate you probably don't know about the rule. And on occasion the Department will still argue with said advocate about how the rule applies at the hearing. Unfortunate, because I definitely feel for the public servant experience described by slice_of_pi. The workforce deserves so much better.