It may take forever and a day sometimes to reach someone at a local Social Security office by phone, but accuracy does not appear to be a problem for the agency. A Social Security evaluation of telephone service at field offices looked at three different categories of accuracy, payment, service and access to disclosure accuracy and Social Security faired pretty well. Below is a report of these evaluations.
Field Office Telephone Service Evaluation
We conduct an annual evaluation of the telephone service in our field offices. Each year we select a random sample of over 100 field offices across the country for the evaluation. We monitor about 2,000 randomly selected calls over the course of the year to assess the accuracy of the information representatives provide and the actions they take. The representatives do not know when we monitor their calls. We use the results of our Field Office Telephone Service Evaluation, which we have conducted since 1999, to identify training needs and clarify operating instructions for our representatives.
We assess the accuracy of the information representatives provide and the actions they take based on our program policies and operating guidelines. We use three measures of accuracy in our Field Office Telephone Service Evaluation:
- Payment Accuracy – indicates the percentage of calls free of payment error. A payment error occurs when a representative’s information or action (or failure to give information or take action) has the potential to affect a caller’s payment or eligibility for benefits adversely;
- Service Accuracy – reflects the percentage of calls free of service error. A service error occurs when a representative does not meet the caller’s need for information, causes the caller inconvenience, or creates an unnecessary additional workload; and
- Access and disclosure accuracy – reflects the percentage of callers properly identified to permit release of personal information from our records. We previously included access and disclosure errors in the calculation of service accuracy.
Our latest published accuracy rates are for FY 2012. Payment accuracy was 96.8 percent, statistically the same as the FY 2011 rate of 97.0 percent. Service accuracy was 91.5 percent. For purposes of comparison, we recalculated the FY 2011 service accuracy rate to remove access and disclosure errors now that we are reporting access and disclosure accuracy as a separate measure. The recalculated FY 2011 service accuracy rate of 92.8 percent was statistically the same as the FY 2012 rate. Access and disclosure accuracy in FY 2012 was 67.1 percent; in FY 2011, access and disclosure accuracy was 69.4 percent, not a statistically significant difference.
National 800 Number Telephone Service Evaluation
We monitor calls to our National 800 Number to evaluate both the accuracy of the information our telephone agents provide and the actions they take. Each year we monitor about 3,000 calls handled by agents in our 38 call centers nationwide. We randomly select and monitor calls throughout the year based on a statistical sampling methodology. Our agents do not know when we monitor their calls. We use the results of our annual National 800 Number Service Evaluation, which we have conducted on an ongoing basis since 1989, to identify training needs and improve operating instructions for our agents.
This evaluation identifies the specific causes of error and the operating policies that our agents did not follow. It uses the same standards of payment, service, and access and disclosure accuracy as our Field Office Telephone Service Evaluation discussed above. Our latest published accuracy rates are for FY 2012. The FY 2012 payment accuracy rate of 98.4 percent was comparable to the FY 2011 payment accuracy rate of 97.8 percent. Service accuracy was 92.2 percent in FY 2012. The FY 2011 rate, which we recalculated to remove access and disclosure errors, was nearly identical at 92.4 percent. The access and disclosure accuracy rate for FY 2012 was 94.5 percent, up significantly from the FY 2011 rate of 91.7 percent.
