Report 2020-128/628.1 Recommendation 16 Responses

Report 2020-128/628.1: Employment Development Department: EDD's Poor Planning and Ineffective Management Left It Unprepared to Assist Californians Unemployed by COVID‑19 Shutdowns (Release Date: January 2021)

Recommendation #16 To: Employment Development Department

To provide a more convenient customer experience, as soon as possible EDD should implement those features of its new phone system that allow callers to request a callback from an agent instead of waiting on hold for assistance.

The Employment Development Department (EDD) has enhanced the functionality of its Virtual Contact Center (VCC) platform and has implemented the "virtual hold" feature which now provides a customer with the option to request a callback if the Estimated Wait Time exceeds 15 minutes within a VCC queue. The "virtual hold" functionality is available in each of the existing available languages: Cantonese, English, Mandarin, Spanish, and Vietnamese.

California State Auditor's Assessment of Status: Fully Implemented

EDD provided us documentation of its notification to its staff that the virtual hold functionality had been implemented.

The EDD is currently working to implement "virtual hold." The EDD has developed the functional requirements and provided them to Verizon to implement into the Virtual Contact Center (VCC). The EDD has conducted User Acceptance Testing (UAT) and deployment occurred on April 20, 2021. The initial "go live" will be for one queue, "Engl Claims Regular." Once the behavior of the system is observed, additional VCC queues will have the "virtual hold" functionality added to them with a target completion date for all VCC queues by May 31, 2021. This feature will improve the customer experience so a call back can be made to a customer, rather than waiting on hold for assistance.

California State Auditor's Assessment of Status: Partially Implemented

We reviewed documentation that EDD provided demonstrating that the virtual hold was implemented and operational for regular English language claims. However, it has not yet been implemented for other languages.

All Recommendations in 2020-128/628.1

Agency responses received are posted verbatim.