South Carolina takes its benefits call centers to the cloud
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By
Chris Teale
After “dismal” timeliness ratings, the state’s Department of Social Services modernized so its centers would be more reliable and use AI to help more quickly administer cases.
In the past, residents trying to get help by phone from one of the South Carolina Department of Social Services’ call centers might be faced with dropped calls, long wait times and server outages that sometimes required a full reboot.
And those issues could cause immense problems for some of the state’s residents, who rely on the department for various assistance programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, child support and reporting abuse and neglect, among others. And delays in those programs could create compliance problems for the state, which must hit various federal targets for when people are engaged.
“Sometimes we can only have one chance to get engaged with that person,” Jose Encarnacion, IT director and chief information officer at the South Carolina Department of Social Services, said during a panel discussion at the AWS Summit in Washington, D.C., last week. “If you miss that, if you're not able to effectively engage that person providing and connecting to the proper services, sometimes it is a matter of life and death in certain situations.”
While Encarnacion said the state had a “tech challenge that we needed to face,” it could not close its call centers and go online-only, as many private-sector businesses have favored over the years. Instead, social services staff wanted their call centers to have improved reliability for applicants, while at the same time making it easier for employees to manage cases, determine eligibility and move them through for approval or denial in a timely fashion.
To do that, DSS turned to Amazon Connect, a contact center that operates in the Amazon Web Services cloud, so is at much less risk of downtime. Using the center’s artificial intelligence-driven features, agents at DSS can now generate transcripts of intake phone calls, with the AI able to review that call, summarize it and suggest next steps. Encarnacion noted that that step was particularly taxing before, as calls could be 30 minutes long and require a lot of note-taking and summarizing by hand.
As a case moves through the process, agents can track its progress and send appointment reminders and other communications to applicants through their preferred method.
Encarnacion said the state “started small” by piloting these new call centers in specific areas of DSS. It started with a small call center with five agents and one supervisor, and hosted an AWS “Immersion Day” where the company comes in, sets up the technology and then allows state staff to learn it for themselves.
“I wanted to make sure it was an improvement,” Encarnacion said, hence its use in a smaller call center. Within two days, that new system was handling calls with the public.
Two weeks after that, the state implemented another center to handle abuse and neglect, which has 200 agents and takes over 1,000 calls a week. DSS took the lessons it learned from the first call center and was able to scale up to another area. “We built the guidance, and before we knew it, we were fully implemented,” Encarnacion said. The last of DSS’ call centers, for handling child support, went live last month.
The improvements have been noticeable. DSS has, for example, 30 days under federal rules to send eligible households SNAP benefits once their application has been submitted. Before this new system was in place, Encarnacion said the state’s timeliness rate was “dismal,” but, after starting the new call center system last fall, it has improved “right off the bat.”
Meanwhile, wait times on hold could be as long as an hour in the state’s old call centers, but the new system allows DSS to offer applicants a callback and to give them caller ID so they know the call is coming from the state. Applicant interviews can now also be scheduled via text message, and the AWS Connect software allows for tweaks “on the fly” to reflect new state laws or to add new features, Encarnacion said.
The new system has also had major benefits during disaster relief. As South Carolina recovered from Hurricane Helene, it received more than 100,000 calls for Disaster SNAP benefits, so DSS scaled up its operations with more than 500 call center agents to deal with the increased caseload. Those agents were trained on the new system in a weekend and immediately put to work, with very few complaints from them or the public.
Encarnacion said it shows what is possible, and how a modernized system can benefit states as they try to administer complex programs.
“Don’t be afraid of innovation,” he said.