Calls to CA_EDD disability insurance centers surged to 12 times their normal volume in late 2021 and early 2022. Many went unanswered, leaving some Californians in the lurch for months.
The offices of the Employment Development Department in Sacramento on Jan. 10, 2022. Photo by Miguel Gutierrez Jr., CalMattersCalls to California’s Employment Development Department disability insurance call centers surged to 12 times their normal volume in late 2021 and early 2022 as the department dealt with fraud. Many went unanswered, leaving some Californians in the lurch for months.
She couldn’t find anything on the department’s website that explained why, so she started calling. The worker she reached said many payments had been delayed due to fraud, but that they should restart soon, Cedillo recalled. In February, Cedillo got a letter from the department asking her to fill out a form and send back documents to verify her identity. She sent the form and documents the next day, she said. Weeks went by. In April, she got another payment. She thinks she’s still owed $168, but, she said in a June interview, “now I feel like I’ve just given up.”the department said
To sift through the influx of claims, verify medical provider and claimants’ identities, and answer an uptick in calls, the roughly 1,000 staff in the disability branch worked 22,000 hours of overtime per month from December 2021 to May 2022. That’s ten times the normal monthly overtime average, according to Lacy. The disability branch also borrowed 133 employees from other branches of the department, and brought back nine retired employees to help with the additional work, according to Lacy.
Call centers should also be able to handle unexpected surges, at least of a certain scale, “without going to pieces,” said Keith Dawson, vice president of Ventana Research, where he leads customer experience research. In January 2022 alone, the call centers received about 5.7 million calls, after receiving an average of about 443,000 per month for May through October of 2021.
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