A Case Study on How to Improve Communications with Unemployment Insurance Claimants
Adopting a simple case management system helped one state labor department decrease workloads for case workers and accelerate processing for claimants
By: Micah Mutrux
Contributions By: Jessie Posilkin and Marcie Chin
Despite millions of Americans depending on unemployment insurance (UI) to help them stay afloat, we’ve seen states’ UI application process fail time and time again due to outdated technology and a bottleneck of cumbersome workflows. We’ve written a lot about our recommended approaches to modernize UI and have worked with partners to achieve a more equitable and efficient UI system.
A common problem our government partners ask our UI team to help solve is improving communication with claimants to reduce backlogs, improve the claimant experience, and lessen call center workloads.
In our most recent case study on Gitbook, we break down how one state successfully solved this problem using principles we share at USDR:
- Incremental and continuous delivery
- Modular development
- Keeping the mission in-house
Prior to modernizing its claimant communication system, this state was not meeting U.S. Department of Labor requirements for quick resolution of claimant issues. They were reliant on fact-finding with claimants via phone calls that often took weeks to schedule, creating a backlog and a burden for both claimants and employees. After building a new case management system that allows claimants to address issues online, the state gets responses from claimants within one day for 50% of issues and examiners have nearly doubled the amount of cases they are able to process in a day.
USDR was not involved in the project described in the case study, but we wrote it up as a great resource for agencies working on similar UI modernization projects.
Let’s Work Together
If you are a government partner looking for support with streamlining the UI processes in order to deliver benefits quickly to those who need it most, please reach out to us here. Similarly, if you are a technologist or public servant looking for ways to volunteer your skills on high-impact, high-urgency projects, join our USDR volunteer community here.
