ATLANTA -- For a year now, 11Alive has documented the same problem. Food stamp recipients waiting on hold, or worse immediately disconnected, while trying to get help with their application.
If you don't think the problem affects you, consider the last round of overtime to deal with a backlog in applications cost taxpayers more than $3.2 million. On Monday, more than 2,000 DFCS employees were ordered to another round of mandatory overtime as the backlog in cases started to creep back up.
It's nothing like the backlog that led the federal government to issue Georgia its first formal warning letter in more than a decade. At the time it called the state's food stamp program a "serious failure." But with a new call center program coming online the first part of December, DFCS Director Bobby Cagle wanted to make sure the agency was ready.
The call center has been a sore spot for beneficiaries for more than a year. The current system can only handle 900 callers, regardless of how many employees are on the other end to answer those calls. So if you're caller 901, you get disconnected.
In the last week of October, data obtained through an open records request showed 66% of the people who called Georgia One for help with a DFCS' social program, never got through. Of 244,173 calls only 47,352 people talked with someone.
"Wow. A little bit of shock," said Nixie-Ann Gumbs, the woman hired to fix the problem.
Gumbs came from the Department of Revenue, and says that state agency was supposed to switch to the same call system as DFCS, but refused. On Monday, she talked about the new call system that is scheduled to go active December 5th.
"We will not throttle or block calls," said Gumbs.
But with more people getting through, wait times are likely to go up. DFCS says its average wait time right now is about 30 minutes, but 11Alive has had people email, call and even send us screen shots complaining of hold times more than double.
Gumbs says the new program will allow callers to leave a number to get a return call, without losing their place in line. Over the next few months DFCS will also phase in the ability to beneficiaries to chat online or send an email for real time answers to their questions.
"I want them to know that we want to be the number one agency and we're going to get there," said Gumbs.
