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Wyoming Unemployment Call Center Finding Difficulty Keeping Up
The global COVID-19 pandemic has caused a tectonic shift in the way Americans do business. For call centers that process unemployment claims, the high unemployment levels have meant floods of callers, despite states and municipalities hoping to direct claimants to automated and online claims processes.
In Wyoming, unemployment call centers have struggled to keep up with volume. The state’s Department of Workforce Services has reported continued high volume with few signs of slowdown, despite a recent down-tick in unemployment claims.
“We’re getting a lot of calls,” DWS Communications Manager Ty Stockton told Wyoming News. “Quite a few of those are people wanting to make a claim over the phone, and those do take some time. … But quite a few are people who have an issue or a question about something that came up, or they got denied and want to figure out what they did wrong.”
To accommodate higher call volumes, DWS announced a partnership in May with TTEC (formerly TeleTech (News - Alert)), a business process outsourcing (BPO) service provider, to expand its capacity to handle the influx of unemployment callers. When the automated responders are unable to help, callers are deferred to the state’s unemployment experts.
“If TTEC can’t answer the question, they’ll send you over to the (unemployment) personnel,” Stockton said. “A lot of times, it winds up that person’s busy ... so it sends them to their voicemail, then they try to get back to everybody within a few days who’s in their voicemail queues.”
Despite the state’s efforts, callers are continuing to report long wait times and dropped calls. The State of Wyoming has reported that more than 15,000 continued claims have been filed each week since mid-April of this year. This stands in contrast to about 2,000 continued claims filed with DWS at the same time last year.
Edited by Maurice Nagle