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5Customer Engagement Defined

The mission of any state's Department of Labor is to help the state's economy thrive. As part of that mission, the department handles and processes all unemployment insurance claims in the state.

Unfortunately for one particular eastern state's citizen claimants, that department's antiquated legacy systems housed an incomplete data set that led to unusually slow handling of unemployment insurance appeals. The system not only lacked important data about the appellant and the related case details but was also missing a record of agent activity. As a result, the unemployment insurance appeals backlog had reached more than 18,000 cases, and the average time for processing an appeal had shot up to 189 days, which forced many of their citizens to go months without unemployment insurance or due process of their case.

To make matters worse, the U.S. Department of Labor (US DOL) imposes time-lapse regulations when doling out money to states for unemployment programs. Because of its delays, the state was in jeopardy of losing federal funding. If nothing else, state leadership needed a way to help the staff stay in compliance with US DOL statutes regarding the response time on the appeals.

Bluewolf was convinced it could modernize the unemployment claims processing and improve the technical processes to better serve the people of the state, which happened to include some Bluewolf employees (although not among the laid-off benefits claimants). We worked with ...