South Carolina Looks to Call Centers to Enhance Citizen Services

Call Centers and Critical Citizen Services Converge

South Carolina runs a 24-hour hotline that citizens, first responders, health care workers and educators use to seek help in cases of child neglect, abuse, exploitation and abandonment. This line receives approximately 300 calls per day.

“We must have it working 24/7 for this type of service because these calls can come at any time, and missing a call can have severe consequences,” Encarnacion said. But as recently as 2020, that was not the case.

“Calls were cut off and sometimes dropped in the middle of the interaction between agents and clients,” Encarnacion said.

He added that the legacy tools they relied on were anything but agile: “Making changes, like in the script, adding additional call flows or updating hours of operations would require change orders, and it could take two to three days.”

South Carolina’s DSS also manages a call center with a 2,500 daily-call volume that conducts phone interviews for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program applicants.

“We have to make a determination of that application within 30 days from the moment that the application was received,” Encarnacion said. Specifically, the U.S. Department of Agriculture requires that all states process 95% of SNAP applications within 30 days. Anything less is considered an unacceptable application processing timeline.

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A dropped or disrupted call could potentially delay a candidate’s application, causing the 30-day cycle to lapse, dragging out the time it takes to get citizens food benefits and keeping agencies from complying with the USDA’s requirements.

For the fiscal year 2022, South Carolina processed over 74% of its applications on time. Some states, such as Washington, have started using cloud solutions to improve access to SNAP benefits. Nevertheless, just 13 states managed to achieve compliance in 2022.

The shortfalls don’t reflect solely on call centers, but Encarnacion said he didn’t want South Carolina’s call center to be the bottleneck in the process.

Minimizing Disruptions and Expediting Application Processing

In 2020, DSS’s sister agency, the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control, used Amazon Connect to deploy 595 agents to answer questions related to COVID-19. 

Seeing the speed and success of the implementation, DSS opted to make a similar deployment, starting with a four-agent call center.

“It wasn’t a very complicated call center, but the fact that we were able to do that process in one day was great,” Enarnacion said.

They subsequently moved on to a larger implementation for the 24-hour child abuse and neglect hotline, which staffs 206 agents.

“Since December 2022, our department has had over 2 million calls without a single disruption in service,” Encarnacion said.

They tackled the largest program last. The Amazon Connect implementation for SNAP entailed updating call center software for 400 agents and 102 supervisors across the state. Upon launch, agents were overwhelmed by the queues, which maxed out within minutes of opening. Callbacks did little to solve the problem.

“A lot of people were not taking the callbacks because they were coming from an 888 number, and people would think, ‘I don’t know who that caller is,’” Encarnacion said. However, Amazon Connect made it easy for them to temporarily disable callbacks while they worked with cellular carriers to set up a branded callback number that applicants could easily recognize.

As a result, application processing timeliness has improved over the course of this year, according to Encarnacion:

• February 2024: 87%
• March 2024: 89%
• April 2024: 90%
• May 2024: 93%
• June 2024: 94%
• July 2024: 94%

Achieving agency goals was Encarnacion’s stated mission. As an added bonus, he said that the overall experience for the call center agents on the other end of the line also improved.

“The Amazon Connect agent workspace consolidated essential tools, enabling our agents to efficiently handle calls, access customer profiles and manage call dispositions, significantly improving their productivity.”

The department has also begun utilizing Amazon Connect’s AI features. Encarnacion said they only leverage it for call summaries and information gathering, and that they have no immediate plans to expand into additional AI capabilities.    

READ MORE: How government call centers can use conversational AI.