SSA touts service improvements, but reassignments tell a different story

In recent days, the Social Security Administration and its newly confirmed commissioner Frank Bisignano have celebrated “key milestones” in its quest to improve customer service, citing its implementation of the Social Security Fairness Act and addition of new automated service lanes on the agency’s 1-800 number and website.

“My commitment to you is that we are going to be a model of excellence,” Bisignano told employees in an agency-wide email Monday. “We are going to give you the technology you need to be successful. And we are going to innovate how we manage the work so that we work smarter.”

But workers at the agency say that as the agency shrinks by an aspired 7,000 workers this fiscal year, management is simultaneously scrambling to triage escalating workloads, causing a communications whiplash akin to being “gaslit,” one said.

SSA touts a 35% reduction in the average speed of answer on its 1-800 number over the same period last year and 90% of calls now handled by “automated self-service options” or the issuance of a callback rather than requiring Americans to wait on hold for a representative. But in actuality, the agency is scrambling to assign more workers to its teleservice centers to handle the high call volume.

Beginning last week, the agency involuntarily reassigned 500 field office customer support representatives to handle calls to the 1-800 number indefinitely and without notice. By Tuesday, that number had risen to 1,000 reassignments.

Jessica LaPointe, president of the American Federation of Government Employees Council 220, which represents SSA field office workers, said the reassignments are proof that the agency needs more staff, not AI helpers.

“They’re robbing Peter to pay Paul,” she said. “And it really invalidates [Bisignano’s] whole theory and vision that SSA doesn’t need any more staff and that AI—or other technology—will solve the customer service problems at the agency and on the 1-800 number.”

In a statement, SSA said the reassignments are in fact a sign of progress.

"While we are seeing improved answer rates on our 800 number due to the new telephone platform, we want to do even better," an SSA official said. "[The] decision to reassign up to 4% of field office staff to the 800 number is only possible due to the new platform."

LaPointe said that when she was briefed on the reassignments, which she says amount to a violation of the union’s collective bargaining agreement because management failed to negotiate over the change in working conditions and they ignore the contract’s provision governing temporary details, the agency suggested it could reassign as many as 2,000 customer service representatives to the 800-number, and that at least some of the reassignments could be permanent.

“This is all happening at the expense of the workloads that the CSRs were doing at the same time that the agency has been creating policies to increase foot traffic in the field offices,” LaPointe said. “There’s ID-proofing, enumeration beyond entry has been suspended, so we’ll be processing a lot more enumeration requests for people with valid work visas. With the birthright citizenship decision, enumeration at birth presumably will end. Who will process all of these applications for new Social Security numbers?”

And the implementation of “call sharing” at SSA field offices are making life more difficult for employees and customers, not less. If a customer calls a particular field office and is on hold for a certain period of time, the call is rerouted to a different field office within the same state. The problem is field office calls often pertain to issues specific to a particular office or case—as a result, workers have started compiling informal workarounds so they can take and then deliver messages to the other field offices.

“There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding with this agency right now of what type of service our communities want and need,” LaPointe said. “They want and need a community-based service, but they’re trying to make this agency into a national or a statewide call center for all field offices, period. Our systems aren’t built for that.”

Bisignano’s email to staff on Monday included an additional bit of news: performance bonuses will be distributed next month. Though Bisignano said he “directed” their distribution, the bonuses were originally slated to go out earlier this year but were delayed during the tenure of then-acting Commissioner Leland Dudek.

“I’ve been told that the workers will feel like they’re winning, like this is a winnable game, and that once we start improving customer service, morale will intrinsically improve because we’re all here to support the mission,” LaPointe said. “But there’s no winning when you drain field offices of their staff, when you talk about how all we need are tech improvements while we’re shuffling chairs on a sinking Titanic.”