The Oregon Employment Department director acknowledged inferior customer service with hundreds of phone calls on hold for more than an hour and delays in delivering first unemployment payments, but said the agency hopes to make progress with additional hires this summer.

“We know that each person that is waiting is an individual that needs our help,” director David Gerstenfeld said during a presentation this week to the Senate Interim Committee on Labor and Business. “This is something that’s really painful, really frustrating for us.”

The discussion focused on the new online system, Frances Online, and two of its major programs: Paid Leave Oregon and Unemployment Insurance.

“I want to be upfront in saying that while both of those programs right now are paying thousands of people a week their benefits very quickly and answering thousands of phone calls a week very quickly, there’s a lot of people that are not being served quickly enough,” Gerstenfeld said.

As of May 27, the agency reported paying $277.7 million in unemployment insurance benefits since the beginning of the year and answering 6,787 calls from May 20 through May 24.

According to data presented to lawmakers, from May 12 through May 18 the unemployment customer care team answered 41% of the 6,180 calls within 5 minutes and 28.6% more than an hour later. The rest of the calls were answered within 5 minutes to an hour.

For the Paid Leave Oregon program, the average wait time was 57 minutes for the 5,226 calls from May 19 through May 25, according to its dashboard.

The average response time was 4.06 days when Oregonians used the “Contact Us” form for the Paid Leave Oregon program.

Since August 14, the paid leave program has cleared 70,740 claims for payment and paid $432 million in benefits.

“The employment department is filled with people that are there to help these people, so it’s very difficult to know that we’re not able to provide the customer service levels that everybody wants, understandably expects and deserves,” Gerstenfeld said.

Employment Department aware of ‘desperation’ among some Oregonians

Sen. Deb Patterson, D-Salem, said her office had received more correspondence about the delays than anything else in the last two months.

Patterson shared the story of one person who said they had filed the same day they lost their job and had placed more than 200 calls to the agency. All but one of those calls had generated a busy signal, she said, and the one call that did go through dropped after the individual was on hold for nearly seven hours.

Gerstenfeld said the phone technology the agency uses provided data confirming stories of frustration.

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“Once we fall below a certain threshold for being timely, it’s not just that more people call us,” he said. “It’s not a linear progression. It goes up sharply and people are understandably more desperate.’

The director gave an example of a day 17,000 calls were made from one phone number.

“So that increase in the number of people and their desperation to get assistance just makes it harder and harder to get caught up,” he said.

Increasing number of calls, fewer staff exasperates delays

Gerstenfeld said the Employment Department lost two-thirds of its unemployment insurance staff from June 2021 to October 2023.

Between April 2023 and February — before the March 4 transition to using the new Frances Online system for unemployment insurance — “the percentage of people getting their first unemployment check within three weeks dropped from just under 92% – which was pretty much at the top tier of the nation – to about 65%,” he said.

“That’s not good customer service,” Gerstenfeld said.

Increased overtime, hiring push and reduced phone line hours

Lindsi Leahy, the unemployment insurance director at OED, said a hiring push is underway with funding from House Bill 4035.

Offers have been extended for 53 positions, some of which will begin in June, Leahy said.

“It will take time to hire all 72 positions and for those folks to become proficient in their work, but we expect the new staff to begin helping make a noticeable, positive impact to our customer service levels beginning in mid to late August,” she said.

The agency also raised the limit of overtime hours from 400 hours per week to 1,000, and staff from other parts of the department have helped respond to messages, Leahy said.

And starting June 4, the agency will temporarily close phone lines on Monday and permanently reduce phone hours to 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, to focus on existing claim issues and processing claims.

“What’s going to be the metric that you will use to determine whether or not the strategy you have set up now … is working,” asked Sen. Kathleen Taylor, D-Portland, chair of the Senate Committee on Labor and Business.

Gerstenfeld said the agency wants to reduce the 13,500 issues that are unresolved for more than six weeks by at least 80%. The agency will start taking phone calls on Monday again once the number is below 2,700. Gerstenfeld said that threshold should be enough to continue making improvements. Leahy said the number of calls unresolved for more than six weeks already is down to 8,000.

Taylor said agency leaders will be asked to provide lawmakers with an update in September.

Dianne Lugo covers the Oregon Legislature and equity issues. Reach her at dlugo@statesmanjournal.com or on X @DianneLugo

This article originally appeared on Salem Statesman Journal: Oregon Employment Department making changes to improve service