Hello, is anyone there? Unemployment phone lines overwhelmed, NC extends hours

As unemployment skyrocketed during the Great Recession, North Carolina officials were fielding 100,000 phone calls a week from people seeking help with unemployment benefits.

Now, nearly that many phone calls are coming in every single day.

That’s an impossible number of calls for the current staff of the state unemployment office to deal with. And it has led to numerous complaints from frustrated North Carolinians who call and are put on hold for hours — or who are just automatically hung up on, without even getting a chance to wait on hold.

“I have called every day, six to eight times a day, and have not been able to speak to anyone,” said Joe Edward, a recently unemployed Cary man. He questioned why the phone lines were still only open during normal business hours — and why there wasn’t an online chat system.

The Division of Employment Security has responded by extending its phone hours — including new Saturday and Sunday availability starting this weekend — and more than tripling its staff. Its leader says it’s open to doing even more despite the added costs.

There have been an average of 80,000 calls a day since the middle of March, said Lockhart Taylor, the head of the office. That’s when Gov. Roy Cooper started ordering coronavirus-related business closures. Thursday, Cooper announced the statewide stay-at-home order will continue into May, if not longer.

Taylor acknowledged the many complaints about unanswered phone calls Tuesday, at a meeting with state lawmakers.

“We really are in somewhat uncharted territory,” he said, explaining that the number of jobless claims — let alone the phone calls — far exceeds what the state saw during the recession a decade ago.

In the last six weeks, since March 15, more than 730,000 people filed for unemployment. State officials had approved just under 290,000 claims as of Thursday, and have so far sent out more than $650 million in state and federal unemployment benefits.

Some people have told The News & Observer they haven’t even been able to file for benefits, however, due to difficulties with both the phones and the website.

Last week, an independent group reviewed the unemployment websites of all 50 states. It said North Carolina’s failed in several key measures, including accessibility and mobile site speed. State officials contested some of that study’s findings but said they’re working on addressing other issues it raised.

Changes this week

Taylor said his office is looking into the possibility of an online chat system to ease the demand on the phones.

One big change was set to start this weekend. The office is allowing people to call for help on the weekend for the first time.

Employees had already started working overtime, including on the weekends, to churn through the new mountains of paperwork, officials have said in the past. But this is the first time they’ll be taking calls on the weekend.

The phones were scheduled to be open from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and from noon to 5 p.m. Sunday.

As of Friday, 1,020 people were there just to answer the phones, according to Taylor — more than double the size of the agency’s entire staff pre-coronavirus.

But Friday also introduced an extra complication — the opening of a new unemployment application for federal benefits, which go to people who don’t qualify for state benefits.

Ellen Gearding of Wilmington said she tried all morning Friday to get answers, but only ran into more frustrations.

”The people answering the phone do not know how to move forward,” Gearding said. “... They simply hang up.”

‘They’re overloaded with calls’

Taylor said the unemployment office had 500 workers two months ago and has 1,600 now. The state budget did not plan for such a massive expansion. But he said they’re going to keep adding more people if the need is there, and will figure out the funding later.

“If it has to go up to do this faster, we will continue to increase and then beg for some additional money later on,” Taylor told the bipartisan committee of lawmakers Tuesday — none of whom objected.

“But right now we’ve certainly utilized all hands on deck, and repurposed every individual in this building.”

The inundated phone lines have led to people being delayed by days in filing their unemployment claim, or potentially missing their window to appeal a rejection. It can feel overwhelming for some, with bills and rent coming due.

When coronavirus job losses first started piling up, state officials were in a bind because they also wanted to let some staff work remotely due to coronavirus. So in order to be able to answer the phones remotely, they contracted with Amazon to set up a cloud server.

But Amazon had been giving the state only so much bandwidth to keep calls on hold. Any calls above that limit have been hung up automatically. But that should be changing, Taylor said, since on Tuesday morning Amazon agreed to expand the state’s capacity.

“We’ve just got authorization this morning that they’re going to expand that ... and not cut anybody off,” he said. “There’s just no worse customer service you can provide someone than to have them cut off.”

However, although that change was announced Tuesday, several people told the N&O on Friday that it hadn’t changed anything for them.

David Exum, who lives in Kannapolis, said he called six times Friday morning and was hung up on every time. It was the same as all the other days he’s tried calling to see what’s going on with his benefits, which he believes are now two weeks late.

“It just tells you that they’re overloaded with calls and they can’t take your call at this time,” Exum said. “Then bye-bye.”