Dear Ministry of Social Development,

Your Work and Income contact centre uses a system that filters out callers to some phone queues when call wait times are longer than 80 minutes. This plays a message stating that due to the call centre being extremely busy, they're unable to answer the call at present, and to please try again later.

1) Please advise how many calls to the Work and Income Call Centre 0800 number (0800 559 009) have been presented with the above message in the twelve months from 1 February 2023 to 31 January 2024, broken down into monthly numbers, divided into specific phone queues, for all queues that use this system (e.g. General enquiry queue, hardship assistance queue).

2) Please advise how many successful calls have been made to Customer Service Representatives in all of these queues during this time period, broken down by month and phone queue, or provide some other way of advising what proportion of total calls to the call centres the answer to question 1 comprises.

3) Please advise the average time a caller has had to wait in your phone queues to get through, broken down by month and phone queue, for the same time period as above. Please distinguish between calls where an automated call-back is utilised, and where it is not.

4) Please provide any policy that explains the reasoning for why a client is presented with instructions to 'Call Work and Income' when they are attempting to apply for assistance online, I.e. In what circumstances are they able to apply for assistance online, and in what circumstances are they required to call the call centre?

5) Please provide a breakdown of how applications for Work and Income assistance were received (phone contact, online application or in person at an office) for the same time period, broken down by request type e.g. benefit application, food grant, special needs grant etc.

If any of the above requests are to be denied due to excessive administrative time required to collate the information, I would ask that you contact me to offer alternatives that may provide similar information, or parts of this information.

Yours faithfully,
Don Thompson

Dear OIA_Requests (MSD),

Ngā mihi for the reply.

In response to your reply:
Re #1) "Please advise how many calls to the Work and Income Call Centre 0800 number (0800 559 009) have been presented with the above message in the twelve months from 1 February 2023 to 31 January 2024, broken down into monthly numbers, divided into specific phone queues, for all queues that use this system (e.g. General enquiry queue, hardship assistance queue)."

Response: "The Ministry is unable to provide the number of calls that are presented and played a message to callers stating that the Contact Centre is busy and unable to answer the call, as this data is not collected in any of our technology systems. As such, this aspect of your request is refused under section 18(e) of the Act, under the basis that this information does not exist."

I accept that there may not be a specific record of the number of times the message is played, however I find it difficult to believe that there would not be statistics generated within a highly monitored call-centre environment that indicate the number of callers who have their calls disconnected by the system due to high demand. Please can you confirm whether there is any way that the Ministry monitors the number of calls that are disconnected due to high demand? Ideally this would include the number who abandon their calls when presented with the 'high demand, please try again later' message, but if the number can only include those where MSD's system has disconnected the call, then please just provide that number (broken down as per the original request). This is essentially what was asked for in the original request, hence it is not a new OIA request.

Re #2 and #3, I requested for the call waiting times to be divided based on the 'queue' that a caller gets filtered into by the automated answering system on the 0800 559 009 line, e.g. the general enquiry queue, the hardship assistance queue etc. - I was given an aggregate number, as MSD interpreted my request as meaning just the 0800 559 009 phone number in general. Please could you break down the table provided by all phone queues that the automated answering system triages calls to.

I also asked for distinction to be made between calls handled by callback and those handled in a more traditional phone queue, however there was no breakdown provided. Can you confirm that the table provided was only for calls answered through a standard phone answering system, i.e. where the caller stays on the line, on hold for the duration, until their call is answered by a Customer Service Representative? If it included 'call-back' calls, could these please be separated out as they will significantly impact on averages.

Thank you again.

Yours sincerely,

Don Thompson

Dear OIA_Requests (MSD),

As a followup - please can you confirm that the 'average time to answer' listed in the table provided is the average time to reach a human, i.e. a Customer Service Representative, not an automated answering system?

If it is possible to include the median waiting times as well as the average waiting times, I would appreciate that as well.

Yours sincerely,

Don Thompson

Tēnā koe OIA_Requests (MSD),

Ngā mihi for your response and arohamai for my slow reply.

I am interested in your answer #2 in your most recent email:
"The Ministry uses phone queues to recognise the training levels of our staff in responding to certain queries. The Ministry does not centrally report on this information."

I would like the average wait time for service users to get through the Work and Income phone system to be able to speak to a human being, specifically those callers who enter the phone queue for hardship assistance like food grants, clothing grants etc.

If it would help make data collation easier, you could advise me the names of the different phone queues Work and Income uses, and briefly the types of calls that are routed through them by the phone system, and I could let you know which ones I am looking for this information on.

Ngā mihi, I appreciate your time and consideration.

Yours sincerely,

Don Thompson