Texas

Local Information Center (Beaumont & Nederland)

Goal

Improve customer service and reduce customer complaints to legislature.

Description

When child support customers are seriously unhappy they call their state legislator. Thus when the new Texas Attorney General went to the Texas Legislature in January 1999 he readily got funding for four new child support call centers to be located in Houston, Dallas, San Antonio and Austin. Previously, all calls had been directed to staff in Austin.

Part of the plan was for all child support customer service calls to be directed to local child support offices -- but new resources were provided only for the four new call centers. Unit Managers Cleve Halliburton and Terry Orick of the Beaumont and Nederland offices of the Texas Attorney General’s Child Support Division (CSD) found themselves with a new responsibility and no additional staff. They decided to join forces to establish an "Information Center" for their combined five-county area, based in Halliburton’s Beaumont office. Not considered large offices, their combined caseload is about 35,000 cases.

Within two months, seven staff (out of 61) were pulled from other duties in the two offices and assigned to answer customer calls -- from both custodial and noncustodial parents. Data lines were used to transfer telephone calls from Nederland to the new Information Center in Beaumont so that calls would be local for Nederland customers as well as Beaumont customers

• Customer service staff in the Information Center answer over 3,000 calls per week, with each staff member averaging over 80 calls per day. Information Center staff take information from customers and resolve as many issues as they can, working with and updating the automated system as they do so. For example, Information Center staff handle status changes, employer changes, payment information, and explanations of time frames.
• When the matter needs resolution by "production" staff, the customer service staff e-mails the production staff member with the customer’s phone number and a description of what the caller wants. Customer service staff focus on answering the phones rather than on doing long, complicated resolutions of problems.
• Production staff have three days to initiate a resolution of the issue -- or actually resolve it. Generally, issues are referred to production staff only if their resolution requires an action on the case such as court action, extensive computer adjustments, or investigation.
• If a customer calls a second time, the customer service staff can see that they sent production staff an e-mail. The caller is referred directly to the production staff member. On the third call, the call is to be forwarded to the office ombudsman. Thus far, there has not been a third time caller.
• In addition, customers can access basic information such as payment information and court dates -- or notify the office of an address change -- through the state’s Voice Information Response System (VIRS) or its web-site.

Results

The Information Center maintains a 93 percent answer rate -- with an average wait of a minute and 13 seconds. Half of the seven percent abandon rate are callers who stay on the line fewer than 30 seconds. This represents a dramatic improvement over the responsiveness of the prior centralized system.

Legislative complaints have gone down to an average of one per week instead of three to four per day. Local legislators’ liaison staff have nothing but compliments.

The office used to have 70 to 100 people in the lobby each day. The only way they could get or provide information was to come in. People would take off work to come in because they could not get through on the phone -- only to be told they had to make an appointment and come back in two weeks.

Now the telephones are being answered directly, so it often is not necessary for customers to come in. If customers do come in, they are seen -- in 15 minutes or less. Now they are down to 30 walk-ins on a very busy day.

Production is up. The overall use of staff is more efficient. When people call with update information, they can get through to the office speedily. Staff uses the improved information to get better results more quickly. In addition, it is helpful to staff to get direct information from callers rather than relying solely on computer interfaces. This often gives staff insight into better strategies for resolving cases. While all cases are worked on a steady basis, staff are able to give some extra attention to the cases of those who call.

Location

A five county area including Beaumont and Nederland, Texas. The project was locally developed. Aspects of the Information Center are being copied by other local offices not served by one of the four Call Centers.

Funding

Regular IV-D funds and existing staff.

Replication Advice

Cleve Halliburton, Unit Manager of the Beaumont office, offers several pieces of advice:

• Staff may be reluctant to specialize in customer service. There were no volunteers for these jobs. Nonetheless, from the management perspective, staff time spent on inquiries is much more efficiently done through the Information Center. It is better than staff dealing with the customer in person or at great length on the telephone.
• Good choices for Information Center are patient staff with broad knowledge of the program and the ability to both answer routine, mundane questions and quickly navigate the computer system. They are investigators on the phone.
• Keep morale high. The unit runs competitions to see who can answer and resolve the most calls, send the least e-mail messages.
• Provide staff with customer service training. Keep customer service staff updated on changes in policies and procedures so they can explain them to customers.