BOISE, Idaho — More help is on the way to the Idaho Department of Labor. The department announced they're now paying a call center in Boise to help take calls.
They expect this to help cut down how long people are on hold and to reduce how many people hear the busy tone when trying to get help with their unemployment claims.
Leah Reeder, a spokesperson for the department, told KTVB they’ve processes more than double the number of claims in the last 10 weeks than all of 2019.
“Our ultimate goal now is really for one for people not to get the busy signal and two to be helped within a reasonable amount of time,” Reeder said.
In order to do this, the department has contracted the services of Maximus, a call center in Boise.
“It’s just another 30 folks basically that can help triage questions, so people are not on hold as long and are able to speak to somebody,” Reeder said.
The 30 people taking calls were trained for two weeks on how to answer questions and take claims over the phone. Reeder said the training is ongoing to assist the workers answer most questions.
If they cannot answer a question, the caller will be transferred to the Department of Labor.
These 30 people taking calls also frees up the department staff. In addition, the department also hired more than 20 people to help with the extra claims.
“They will be issuing determinations, processing weekly reports, calling people about their unemployment insurance, if they filed for extensions,” Reeder said.
Since these workers won’t be spending as much time on the phone, they can look into people's claims and figure out why that person isn’t getting their money, according to Reeder.
“Maybe they typed in a driver's license incorrectly and we can't verify their identity, so we can call and verify that,” she said.
The biggest change that people will need to know is the number to call has changed. Instead of calling the Department of Labor; people will need to dial a toll-free number. That number is 833-410-1009.
The contract for the call center runs through the end of the year. Reeder told KTVB they will reassess the situation after a few days to see if more people are needed to take calls.
The department's click-to-chat is temporarily unavailable. Reeder said they want a true assessment of how well the call center is working out, so they disabled the click to chat. It could be down for a week or more. An exact timeline was not given.