OFFICE OF WORKERS’

COMPENSATION

PROGRAMS

Goals and Monitoring Are

Needed to Further

Improve Customer

Communications

Statement of Michael Brostek, Director

Tax Administration and Justice

United States General Accounting Office

GAO Testimony

Before the Subcommittee on Workforce Protections

Committee on Education and the Workforce

House of Representatives

For Release on Delivery

10:00 a.m. EDT

Tuesday

October 3, 2000

GAO-01-72T

Statement 

Office of Workers’ Compensation Programs:

Goals and Monitoring Are Needed to Further

Improve Customer Communications

Page 1 GAO-01-72T

Mr. Chairman and Members of the Subcommittee:

Thank you for the opportunity to testify on the Department of Labor’s

Office of Workers’ Compensation Programs (OWCP). You asked us to

review how OWCP communicates with injured federal workers, agencies

who employ these individuals, and medical and other service providers

who are involved in their treatment. In general, our review focused on how

well OWCP’s performance management system was used to respond to

claimants’ and other customers’ inquiries, both over the telephone and in

written correspondence. This statement responds to your request by

describing how we conducted our review and what we found.

To evaluate OWCP’s system, we used criteria suggested by the National

Partnership for Reinventing Government (NPR). 1 NPR performed an

extensive study of high performance customer service organizations in the

private sector and their best practices for providing telephone service.

NPR stated that the level of service a customer receives should not vary

significantly across an organization. NPR also found that model customer

service organizations in the private sector generally follow three consistent

approaches or best practices for telephone communications. First, they set

challenging goals for meeting callers’ needs for timely and accurate

information. Second, they collect credible performance data to measure

progress in attaining those goals. Third, they continuously improve

telephone service by using the performance data and results of periodic

surveys of customers and stakeholders to determine levels of satisfaction.

While OWCP uses these model organizations’ approaches to some extent

in communicating with its customers, its efforts frequently did not equal

those in the private sector that NPR identified or in the three federal and

state agencies we surveyed that have won awards for customer service.

We found that OWCP

• provided widely varying service levels across its district offices for those

attempting to reach OWCP representatives by phone;

• did not set any goals for some important areas of telephone

communications, and the goals it did set for telephone and written

communications generally tended to be less exacting than the goals NRP

suggests or that other customer service operations we surveyed

established for themselves;

 

1

 The National Performance Review, now entitled the National Partnership for Reinventing

Government, was begun in 1993 under the direction of Vice President Gore. NPR directed federal

agencies to build a customer focus into their operations to eliminate unnecessary bureaucracy,

streamline processes, and serve the public more cost effectively.

Results in Brief
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Improve Customer Communications

Page 2 GAO-01-72T

• did not often collect timely or credible performance data to gauge progress

in attaining its goals; and

• did not adequately survey injured workers, medical providers, and others

to determine levels of satisfaction, or follow many other practices that

NPR’s model organizations use to improve customer service.

At the conclusion of my testimony, I will discuss ways that we believe

OWCP can improve its telephone and written communications with

customers.

To get an indication of whether OWCP was providing consistent customer

service regardless of where injured workers live, we placed a total of 2,400

telephone calls to OWCP’s 12 district offices (200 per office). During these

calls, we attempted to obtain information that an injured federal worker

might be calling to request (e.g., status of compensation payments or

medical bill inquiries). For each call, we recorded how successful the

district office was in providing this information (e.g., busy signal, no

answer after 1 minute, reached voice mail system, obtained consistent

information about claimant from the automated system, spoke to an

OWCP representative).

To determine what goals OWCP had set to improve customer service and

how the performance data from these measures are used to improve the

program, we (1) visited OWCP headquarters in Washington, D.C., and

interviewed officials and obtained documentation, including strategic and

annual operational plans; (2) visited 5 of the 12 OWCP district offices

(Chicago, Dallas, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C.) and

interviewed district directors and others and obtained documentation on

office practices; and (3) surveyed the remaining 7 OWCP district offices to

collect some similar information, such as the extent to which telephone

inquiries are recorded.

To compare OWCP’s goals and practices for telephone communication

with those of model organizations, we surveyed three agencies that have

won awards for their telephone communication practices: the Social

Security Administration (SSA), Department of Veterans Affairs’ Benefits

Administration (VBA), and state of Ohio’s Bureau of Workers’

Compensation (Ohio’s BWC). We asked OWCP and the three agencies to

identify which of 95 telephone “best practices” they use that NPR

identified in its 1995 study.

We did our work between January and September 2000. (See appendix I

for additional information regarding scope and methodology.)
Statement

Office of Workers’ Compensation Programs: Goals and Monitoring Are Needed to Further

Improve Customer Communications

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OWCP is responsible for adjudicating and administering claims of workrelated injuries and illnesses as authorized by the Federal Employees’

Compensation Act (FECA) (5 U.S.C. 8101 et seq., as amended).2 The FECA

program covers nearly 3 million active duty civilian federal employees,

providing benefits to those it determines sustain an injury or illness in the

performance of duty worldwide.

During fiscal year 1999, FECA’s costs totaled about $1.9 billion in

compensation, medical, and death benefits, and federal employees filed

about 167,000 injury notices. At the end of fiscal year 1999, OWCP was

administering about 243,000 ongoing injury cases, including from previous

years, for partial or total disability.

According to OWCP officials, they receive an estimated 2.6 million phone

calls and 5.5 million pieces of mail each year from customers--claimants,

medical providers, agencies, and others. Some mail requires a response—

for example, congressional inquiries on behalf of constituents. However,

district office officials said they believed that most of the mail does not

require a response. For example, medical reports are used to assist claims

examiners in adjudicating cases but do not usually require a response.

Although OWCP did not know what proportion of its mail requires a

response, district office officials’ estimates ranged from 1 percent to 7

percent.

The telephone calls and written correspondence are handled primarily by

12 OWCP district offices nationwide, which had a total of about 900

employees as of December 1, 1999. These district offices operate under the

authority and guidance of OWCP headquarters and are responsible for

adjudicating claims from injured workers, approving wage loss claims,

paying medical bills, and responding to inquiries from customers. Each

district office is responsible for providing services to claimants living in

several states.

OWCP has taken actions to improve customer communications over the

last 5 years. These actions have included

• implementing automated voice response systems at all 12 district offices to

provide information on the claims, such as the status of bill payments, 24

hours a day;

 2

 OWCP also adjudicates and administers claims authorized by the Longshore and Harbor Workers’

Compensation Act, which covers employees engaged in maritime employment, and for recipients of

Black Lung compensation.

Background
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Improve Customer Communications

Page 4 GAO-01-72T

• expanding automated voice response systems to allow pharmacy staff to

verify claimant’s eligibility and the amounts of drug payments authorized;

• beginning the process of converting incoming medical bills and other

correspondence to a computerized format to make the information

available to district office representatives via their computer terminals,

enabling them to answer more queries during initial calls;

• giving federal agencies, unions, and congressional staff direct computer

access to information they need to deal with their employees’ or

constituents’ cases; and

• initiating a communications redesign project last year--which included

establishing a redesign team comprised of union members and

management to propose standards, reengineer practices, and make other

improvements in OWCP’s communications--and investigating best

practices in public and private organizations.

OWCP has also taken actions when its monitoring systems have indicated

that district offices have failed to meet goals for responsiveness to

telephone inquiries. For example, when district offices failed to meet goals

for responding to telephone inquiries for one or more quarters of a fiscal

year, OWCP’s national office counseled the district directors and required

plans for improvement.

In addition, OWCP’s budget request for fiscal year 2001 requested funding

for a toll free 800 telephone number for medical authorizations, for

telephone system hardware upgrades, for additional communication

specialists, and for expanded access to automated information for injured

workers. As of September 22, 2000, the House and Senate appropriation

committees for OWCP had decided not to fund this request.

Although NPR has stated that the level of service a customer receives

should not vary significantly across an organization, we found that service

levels varied widely for those attempting to reach OWCP representatives

by phone. As figure 1 shows, the extent to which we were unable to access

district offices’ telephone systems on our 2,400 calls—that is, where there

was a busy signal, no answer after 1 minute, or a message erroneously

stating that the phone number was invalid—ranged from 0 percent in

Boston to 54 percent in Jacksonville.

Telephone Customer

Service Levels Varied

Widely Across District

Offices
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Office of Workers’ Compensation Programs: Goals and Monitoring Are Needed to Further

Improve Customer Communications

Page 5 GAO-01-72T

Source: GAO analysis of telephone survey calls to district offices.

The reasons given for our not being able to access the phone system

varied. For example, in Jacksonville we frequently experienced busy

signals because district officials there said that they believe it is better for

a customer to receive a busy signal than to remain on hold for an extended

period of time at the caller’s expense. Conversely, for San Francisco, we

experienced a relatively high frequency of calls with no answer after 15

rings (about 1 minute). The San Francisco district director told us this was

caused by a flaw in the phone system that has existed for years. She said

that, although the customer hears the phone ringing, the system does not

recognize that someone is calling. She also said that she had spoken with

officials from the phone company as well as communication officials in the

Department of Labor, but that the problem remained unresolved. OWCP’s

Acting Director said that the problem with the phone system had been

resolved as of September 13, 2000. The Acting Director also stated that the

Figure 1: Percentage of Calls Failing to

Access OWCP Telephone Systems by

District Offices
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Improve Customer Communications

Page 6 GAO-01-72T

Washington, D.C., office had purchased an additional eight telephone lines

in late July 2000 and that he believes this will increase the system’s

accessibility.

We also found that our ability to speak to an OWCP employee varied

significantly across districts. Of the 2,400 calls we made, 1,200 calls were

to either an office phone number designated for contacting an employee or

a central phone number that gives callers an option for contacting a

representative. As figure 2 shows, the rates at which we were unable to

reach any employee within 5 minutes ranged from 13 percent to 97 percent

of the calls.3

 In three offices—Jacksonville, Dallas, and New York—we

were unable to access an employee on 97, 86, and 80 percent of the calls,

respectively.4

 

3

 We chose to wait no longer than 5 minutes for a representative from the time we made a selection

requesting a representative because we believed this was a conservative approach, given VBA’s goal of

reaching a representative within 3 minutes and NPR’s guidance and Ohio BWC’s goal of 30 seconds.

4

 We also placed 1,200 calls initially to the district offices’ automated telephone voice response

systems, followed by an attempt to contact a representative. The proportion of representatives we

were unable to contact using this approach was even higher than when using our other approach.

However, we made a conservative assumption that a caller whose primary reason for calling was to

speak to a representative, would call the specific number for accessing a representative at those

district offices with such a number, or immediately attempt to access a representative at an office with

only one number.
Statement

Office of Workers’ Compensation Programs: Goals and Monitoring Are Needed to Further

Improve Customer Communications

Page 7 GAO-01-72T

Source: GAO analysis of telephone survey calls to district offices.

The most frequent reasons why our telephone calls did not reach an

employee were that we were

• still receiving a busy signal or no answer after 15 rings,

• transferred to a voice mail box after selecting the option to speak to a

representative,

• still on hold 5 minutes after selecting an option to speak to an employee, or

• disconnected after selecting an option to speak to an employee.

Officials at the five district offices we visited said that there were too few

employees to both answer the phones and adjudicate claims as well as

perform the other services that they must provide. On the other hand, an

official at OWCP headquarters said that they did not want to reward those

Figure 2: Percentage of Calls Failing to

Access an OWCP Representative by

District Offices
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Improve Customer Communications

Page 8 GAO-01-72T

offices with the lowest telephone access rates by giving them part of

another office’s staff allocation.

When we made our 2,400 telephone calls, we also attempted on 1,200 of

those calls to compare the information on actual injured workers’ claims

provided to us by OWCP headquarters officials with the same information

available on that claimant through district offices’ telephone systems.5

 For

example, if OWCP headquarters told us that claimant Mary Smith was

mailed a compensation check of $550, would the district office where

Mary’s claim was handled provide us with this same information?

We did not include 604 of the 1,200 calls in our analysis: 138 calls where we

could not access the phone system for various reasons (e.g., busy signal);

43 calls where we could access the phone system but not the interactive

voice response system for various reasons (e.g., claim number was

different from that provided by headquarters), and 423 calls where we

could not compare the information because it had been updated after

OWCP headquarters provided it to us.

For the remaining 596 calls, the extent to which district offices provided us

with consistent claims information ranged from 88 percent to 100 percent.

(See appendix II for information on the accuracy of each district office’s

interactive voice system.) Most of the inconsistent information involved

the dates and amounts of claimants’ compensation checks.

Other communication practices also varied significantly across district

offices:

• The Dallas office, unlike most others, used e-mail for medical

authorizations, congressional contacts, and general inquiries. The four

other district offices we visited did not use e-mail because of Privacy Act

concerns.

• The national office and four district offices have taken steps to provide

customers information through the Internet, while others have not. The

Internet-linked offices have established a World Wide Web page to provide

information about the workers’ compensation program and the district

offices’ procedures and practices.

 

5

 For the 1,200 calls we placed attempting to obtain automated voice information, we were able to

access most of the district offices’ telephone systems on a higher proportion of calls than we did for

the 1,200 calls attempting to access a representative. For calls attempting to access the automated

system, we were unable to access district offices’ telephone systems on from 0 to 37 percent of the

calls to each office.
Statement

Office of Workers’ Compensation Programs: Goals and Monitoring Are Needed to Further

Improve Customer Communications

Page 9 GAO-01-72T

• Most district offices had representatives available to answer the phone 7 or

more hours per day, but three offices—New York, Philadelphia, and

Boston--were available by phone 6 hours or less per day, and one of these

offices—Boston—had representatives available for only 4.5 hours.

OWCP had not set any goals in some important areas of telephone

communications and the goals it did set for telephone and written

communications allowed OWCP more time to provide responses to

customers than NPR suggests for telephone communications or that other

organizations we surveyed allowed. For example, NPR suggests the

following telephone service goals:

• 99 percent of callers access the telephone system;

• 98 percent of callers reach a customer service representative, and the time

waiting on line be no more than 30 seconds; and

• 85 percent of callers’ inquiries should be resolved during the first call.

These three basic goals focus on meeting callers’ needs for timely and

accurate information. The other agencies we contacted--SSA, VBA, and

Ohio’s BWC--varied in whether they established goals for these measures.

Three had goals for telephone access, two had goals for the portion of

callers reaching representatives and the time they have to wait on line, and

one had a goal for resolving inquiries on the first call.

OWCP had not set goals that conform to any of these three goals. OWCP

did have a goal to return 90 percent of phone calls not related to medical

authorizations within 3 days to persons who leave messages. That goal

could be met by OWCP’s calling the people within 3 days, giving them the

status of their claims, and saying that the answer to their questions would

follow at a later time. However, OWCP’s Acting Director noted that this is

the only response possible for many calls when OWCP lacks information,

such as doctors’ reports, needed to resolve the caller inquiry. OWCP also

had a separate goal established in fiscal year 1999 to return 95 percent of

calls related to medical authorizations within 3 days.

NPR estimates that organizations that answer a caller’s question on the

first call will spend less time and about half the resources as organizations

that take multiple calls to answer inquiries. OWCP’s Acting Director said

that he recognized the benefits of answering the calls the first time and

that an ongoing OWCP program to make more claimant information

available on district office computer terminals could help achieve such a

goal. He added, however, that he believed establishing a goal for answering

queries would be more appropriate for an organization with a call center

OWCP Did Not Have

Goals for Some

Important Customer

Service Areas
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Improve Customer Communications

Page 10 GAO-01-72T

whose employees’ only responsibility is answering telephone calls. He

explained that because district offices have many other responsibilities in

addition to answering calls, some district offices prefer to direct most calls

to voice mail and respond at a later time. Several district directors told us

that, if there were such a goal, assigning additional employees to answer

calls would take time away from their adjudication of claims.

The scope of NPR’s study did not include identifying what goals the private

sector has for responding to written inquiries, as it did for telephone

communications. Thus, we could not compare the goals that OWCP has

established for the timeliness of written communications with an NPR

suggested standard.

Nevertheless, for nonpriority mail requiring a response, OWCP had a goal

of responding to 85 percent within 30 days. OWCP also had goals for

responding to priority mail from Congress: 90 percent within 14 days and

98 percent within 30 days. These goals do not compare favorably to VBA’s

goal of responding to all written benefit inquiries within 10 workdays and

Ohio’s BWC’s goal of responding to written requests the same day, or

within 24 hours of the request’s being referred to another section of the

Bureau.6

OWCP also did not have a national goal for responding to requests for

medical authorizations in the mail, through e-mail, or by fax. Nonetheless,

the five district offices we visited gave written medical authorization

requests received by mail the same priority that OWCP gave congressional

correspondence. Several of these five offices have also established their

own goals for medical authorizations received by e-mail or fax. For

example, the Dallas district office encourages claimants to use e-mail for

medical authorizations. Dallas had a goal of responding to 90 percent of emails within 24 hours. The Chicago district office received 95 percent of its

medical authorization requests by telephone. The district office has chosen

to use the goal for medical authorizations received by phone—95 percent

within 3 days—for authorization requests received by fax.

 6

 Prior GAO testimony (Veterans Benefits Administration: Problems and Challenges Facing Disability

Claims Processing, GAO/T-HEHS/AIMD-00-146) stated that VBA—with an average time for processing

claims of 205 days--was far from reaching its strategic goal of 74 days. While VBA did not meet its goal

for processing claims, VBA officials provided reports stating that it did meet the 10-day goal for

responding to nonpriority correspondence 97 percent of time in fiscal year 1999. A VBA official said

that just telling inquirers that they would be contacted at a later date with an answer did not constitute

a valid response for purposes of calculating the rate. We did not independently verify VBA’s response

rates. SSA does not have goals for responding to written correspondence.
Statement

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Improve Customer Communications

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Often, OWCP did not collect credible performance data to gauge progress

in attaining its goals. Credible performance information is essential for

accurately assessing agencies’ progress toward meeting existing goals and

for setting new goals.7

 Decisionmakers must have assurance that the

program and financial data being used will produce complete, credible,

useful, and consistent data in a timely manner if these data are to inform

decisionmaking.

OWCP’s system for measuring its goal of 3 days for returning phone calls

to those who left a message that required a response did not yield valid

timeliness measurements. It could do this by either creating a record of all

such calls or of a statistically valid sample. While all calls may not require a

response, district office officials have stated that most callers have

inquiries that require a response. The national office suggested--but did not

require--that district employees use a standardized computer program (CA110) to make a recording of all calls requiring a response, as well as of

those in which the content is relevant to adjudicating decisions. OWCP did

not require the use of this program for all calls because some district office

employees have complained about taking time away from their other tasks

to record the information, such as the date and nature of the call.

We found that all 12 district offices used the CA-110 system to some

extent. However, two of the five offices we visited—Dallas and Seattle--

told us that they entered only about 15 percent or fewer of all calls

requiring a response and did not enter calls in the systematic manner that

would be necessary to yield valid results. The other three offices—

Chicago, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C.--estimated that they entered

about 75, 75, and 95 percent of the calls requiring a response, respectively.

However, our analysis of the number of calls received and the number of

calls recorded in the CA-110 system suggests that these estimates are high.8

For example, San Francisco estimated that it entered 75 percent, but for a

3-month period in fiscal year 2000, San Francisco received 76,238 calls and

entered 14,502, or 19 percent, in the CA-110 system.

Moreover, four offices—Cleveland, San Francisco, Seattle, and

Washington, D.C--also used alternative methods to record and track a

portion of their calls. Each of these offices was supposed to follow a

 

7

 Managing for Results: Challenges Agencies Face in Producing Credible Performance Information

(GGD-00-52, Feb. 4, 2000).

8

 The five district offices provided us with information on the number of calls received that was based

on periods from 4 weeks to 3 months. These offices also provided us with the number of calls recorded

in their CA-110 systems over various periods of time.

OWCP Lacked Valid

Information to

Measure Progress in

Achieving Goals

Progress Measures for

Telephone Timeliness Were

Invalid
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Improve Customer Communications

Page 12 GAO-01-72T

sampling plan approved by OWCP headquarters when recording

information. However, the OWCP Acting Director said that each of these

four offices had developed a modified version of the sampling plan and

that their plans--while approved by OWCP--were probably not statistically

valid. We reviewed the national office’s sampling plan for the data to be

entered into these systems and also believe that this plan would not yield

statistically valid results even if implemented as designed.

The telephone response rates developed using the CA-110 and other

systems indicated that the district offices were generally meeting their

timeliness goals. However, because the performance data were not

statistically valid or collected in enough cases, OWCP could not determine

whether these goals were being met.

We also found problems in the methods that OWCP used to measure

timeliness goals for written correspondence that undermine the usefulness

of the data. Each district office was required to take a statistical sample of

incoming general, nonpriority correspondence, and then record and track

the correspondence to determine whether it was responded to within 30

days. The results of these samples were to be reported to the national

office on a quarterly basis. Four of the five district offices we visited each

had a different approach for sampling such correspondence, and each

stated that its approach was not scientifically developed or developed in a

manner that would produce valid results if projected to the universe of all

responses.9

 For example, the Dallas district office required each claims

examiner to provide his or her supervisor four pieces of written

correspondence requiring a response per month to determine whether the

response was provided within 30 days. We are concerned about the

validity of this approach because, among other things, the potential exists

for the claims examiner to give the supervisor only those letters to which

the response was timely.

The Seattle district office required claims examiners to log in all general

correspondence received every Wednesday that required a response.

Supervisors were to review the claimants’ files for these letters after 30

days to determine whether a response had been sent within the 30-day

goal.

We are concerned about the validity of this approach because, among

other things, OWCP employees may devote extra attention to responding

to letters arriving on Wednesday at the expense of letters arriving on other

 

9

 Chicago district office officials stated that they track all of their nonpriority written correspondence.

Progress Measures for

Timeliness of Written

Correspondence Were Also

Invalid
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Page 13 GAO-01-72T

days. Although the performance data showed that this timeliness goal for

fiscal year 1999 was generally met by all district offices, the results are

probably not statistically reliable.

Conversely, OWCP did seem to have a valid and reliable system for

tracking responses to priority mail involving congressional requests. For

example, the date of receipt of all congressional correspondence was to be

recorded in the Priority Correspondence Tracking System. This system

provides reports that track each piece of correspondence until a response

is provided.

As I said earlier, the third approach that NPR found model organizations

followed was to continuously improve customer service by using

performance data—including surveys of important customers and

stakeholders-- to identify how and where improvements are needed. We

found that OWCP’s efforts in this area fell well short of the best practices

that NPR found in the private sector and in the three agencies we

surveyed.

Let me first state the obvious--OWCP did not measure progress toward

goals that it did not establish in the first place. OWCP did not have goals—

nor did it have related measures—for three basic areas of telephone

communications:

• the percentage of callers able to access the telephone system,

• the percentage of callers who can reach a customer service representative

and their time waiting on line, and

• the percentage of callers’ inquiries that are resolved during the first call.

Officials from SSA and VBA told us that setting goals for those areas (e.g.,

telephone access) for their agencies and measuring the results has proven

useful in identifying areas where customer satisfaction levels needed

improving. For example, data from SSA’s customer satisfaction surveys in

1993 showed that access was the single biggest factor affecting customer

satisfaction. According to an SSA official, SSA began collecting access data

and found that callers attempting to reach SSA at the busiest times were

getting busy signals 50 percent of the time. SSA established a telephone

access goal and continued to collect access data, explore new

technologies, and acquire additional telephone capacity. By 1996, SSA said,

it was able to set and achieve a goal of 95 percent of the callers reaching

the system within 5 minutes, and customer satisfaction scores improved

accordingly.

OWCP Often Lacked

Customer Satisfaction

Data to Know How and

Where Improvements

Were Needed
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My point in using this example is that without goals or measures in these

three basic high priority areas, OWCP was not in a position to know what

levels of customer service it was providing and where and how telephone

services needed to be improved.

For the goals that OWCP did establish, we found that it often did not

collect credible performance data from surveys of (1) injured workers, (2)

medical providers, or (3) employees that was sufficiently reliable or done

in a timely manner to measure progress or to set goals for improving

customer service.

NPR found that model telephone service organizations in the private

sector survey (1) their customers frequently to determine how satisfied

they are with the services provided and (2) their employees who are

answering the phones for job satisfaction levels and ideas to improve their

services. In addition, Executive Order 12862, issued September 11, 1993,

directs departments and agencies to survey customers to determine the

kind and quality of services they want and their level of satisfaction with

existing services.

Every organization must decide how frequently it can survey its customers

in a cost-effective manner. However, we found that OWCP (1) did not

obtain information on injured workers’ satisfaction with services as

frequently and by utilizing as many techniques as other model

organizations do; (2) did not survey other important stakeholders, such as

medical providers and federal agencies; and (3) did not survey the OWCP

employees who are answering the phones.

OWCP did do customer satisfaction surveys of injured workers. Since

1996, OWCP has hired a contractor to conduct customer satisfaction

surveys about once each year to determine claimants’ perceptions of

several aspects of the FECA program, including overall service, the

timeliness of responses to telephone inquiries, and the timeliness,

thoroughness, and accuracy of written responses to claimants’ inquiries.10

The claimants are selected on a random sample basis. During these

surveys, injured workers are asked to recall situations that occurred up to

1 year in the past.

NPR recommends as a best practice that organizations survey their

customers constantly to determine satisfaction levels for existing services

 

10 The surveys were conducted in 1996 and 1998 by the same contractor. In 1997, OWCP contracted

with another contractor to perform a similar survey.

OWCP Did Little to Gauge

Customer Satisfaction

Levels
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and to gather requests for new services. Ohio’s BWC surveys

approximately 600 injured workers weekly by mail.

The OWCP Acting Director said that OWCP does not conduct a customer

satisfaction survey of medical providers because it had difficulty doing so

in the past. That is, OWCP officials said they had previously attempted to

survey medical providers; however, when they called the representative in

the medical provider’s office often could not identify the individual who

had previously called OWCP.

Some district office directors and other officials cited outreach programs

that, while not necessarily systematic, were an attempt to gain more input

from a broader selection of customers. For example, the Seattle district

office, in May 2000, initiated a program to begin calling a sample of all

telephone callers within the same week they called. The district director

said that the office asked the callers whether the response was appropriate

and if the caller was satisfied with the representative’s response. OWCP

national office officials said that these efforts did not ensure that

consistent questions were used or that a random sample of all district

office customers was surveyed.

OWCP also has not surveyed its own employees regarding customer

service or employee satisfaction within the last 5 years. According to NPR,

employee satisfaction is measured as routinely as customer satisfaction in

model customer service organizations. NPR cited as benefits of such

employee surveys: obtaining information on how to improve the work

processes that lead to improved customer service, as well as identifying

employee morale issues that could lead to customer service problems. In

addition, Executive Order 12862 directed agencies to survey front-line

employees on barriers to, and ideas for, matching the best in business.

Officials from Ohio’s BWC told us that they have systems in place, such as

an annual employee survey that captures information about employee

morale.

NPR identified 95 best telephone service practices of customer service

organizations in the private sector. Of these 95, we categorized 20

practices as being related to performance measurement and 68 as related

to improving customer service through use of performance data.11 Each of

these “practices” also contained several major activities. For example, the

practice of managing customer dissatisfaction with telephone service

 

11 We determined that the other seven best practice categories were not related to either improving

customer service through the use of performance and other data or to measuring performance.

OWCP Followed Fewer

NPR Best Practices Than

the Other Three Agencies

We Visited
Statement

Office of Workers’ Compensation Programs: Goals and Monitoring Are Needed to Further

Improve Customer Communications

Page 16 GAO-01-72T

included related activities, such as establishing a dedicated customer

relations team to receive complex customer issues and complaints and

recording caller complaints for use in identifying the root causes of

problems. While no organization would be expected to apply all of these

best practices, we wanted to determine the extent to which OWCP was

applying these practices in comparison to SSA, VBA, and Ohio’s BWC.

Consequently, we asked these organizations to characterize to what

extent—“all,” “some,” or “none”--they followed the activities within each of

these practices.

Of the 20 best practices related to measuring performance, OWCP stated

that two best practices were not applicable because they applied to call

center operations and OWCP does not have any call centers. Of the 18 that

OWCP said were applicable, it reported that it performed “all” or “some” of

9 of the 18 practices, or 50 percent. This compares to SSA, VBA, and Ohio’s

BWC, who reported that they performed 20, 17, and 20, or 100, 85, and 100

percent, of all 20 NPR best practices, respectively. Of the 9 practices

OWCP indicated it did not perform, SSA, VBA, and Ohio’s BWC responded

that they applied 8 of them to all or some extent. Examples of these 8

performance measuring practices follow.

• Call monitoring: Senior managers regularly listen in on live calls in order to

stay in touch with the customer. Team leaders participate in group

monitoring sessions to ensure consistency of measurement.

• Accessible to customers: A customer feedback loop is built into every

phase of the customer service delivery process. It is convenient and easy

for customers to contact world-class organizations.

Of the 68 best practices for improving customer service, OWCP said that 6

practices were not applicable because they applied to call centers. Of the

62 practices OWCP said were applicable, OWCP reported that they

generally followed to all or some extent 31 of the 62 practices, or 50

percent. This compares to SSA, VBA, and Ohio’s BWC, who reported that

they followed 65, 51, and 66, or 96, 75, and 97 percent, of the 68 NPR best

practices to all or some extent, respectively. Of the 31 practices OWCP

indicated it did not perform, SSA, VBA, and Ohio’s BWC each responded

that they applied 18 of them to all or some extent. Examples of these 18

practices follow.

• Information queuing: Callers waiting in the queue are provided with

information as to the expected length of delay, allowing them to choose

whether to stay in queue or hang up.
Statement

Office of Workers’ Compensation Programs: Goals and Monitoring Are Needed to Further

Improve Customer Communications

Page 17 GAO-01-72T

• Resource allocation strategies: Continuous evaluations of key performance

indicators help to ensure the appropriate alignment of resource allocations

with planning objectives. Well-established benchmarking programs help

identify improvement opportunities for cross-functional teams.12

OWCP has been concerned about the level of services that it provides to its

customers—injured workers, medical service providers, and agencies. The

annual surveys of injured workers that OWCP has contracted for have

surfaced issues, like access to service representatives, that OWCP has

taken actions to address. For instance, the installation of the automated

response systems in district offices have given customers an alternative

means of getting answers to common questions. OWCP has also begun to

set goals and use data about goal achievement to manage the customer

service aspect of district office operations.

However, OWCP’s customer service efforts fell short of practices used in

three organizations we surveyed and in model organizations in the private

sector that NPR studied. According to our telephone survey, customers’

access to OWCP’s telephone systems and to customer service

representatives varied widely by district office. OWCP had not established

goals for several important aspects of telephone service. Where OWCP had

set telephone or written communication goals, they generally tended to be

less exacting than the goals NPR suggests or that other customer service

operations we surveyed established for themselves. Further, for those

goals OWCP had established, the systems for collecting performance

information were not yielding credible information that OWCP could use

to make properly informed decisions about its customer service

operations. In addition, OWCP officials reported using proportionately

about one half as many best practices related to measuring performance

and proportionately from one half to two thirds as many best practices

related to improving customer service through the use of performance and

other data as did the three award winning customer service operations we

surveyed. By developing goals for important areas of telephone

communications, determining if the timeliness goals for telephone and

 

12 In a second response to our request after reviewing our draft testimony, OWCP revised its responses

to 15 of the best practices, including increasing from 8 to 14 the number of practices it considered not

applicable because the activities applied to call centers. Based on OWCP’s revised response, OWCP

considers 3 of the 20 best practices for performance measurement not to be applicable and reported

that it performs all or some of 11 of the remaining 17 practices, or 65 percent. Of the 68 best practices

for improving customer service, OWCP said that 11 were not applicable. OWCP reported that they

followed to all or some extent 39 of the remaining 57 practices, or 68 percent. We reported OWCP’s

original responses in comparison to those of the other organizations’ responses because the other

organizations did not have an opportunity to revise their responses to our survey. In addition, we did

not have an opportunity to analyze OWCP’s revisions, including its position on the NPR practices that

it viewed as applicable only to call center operations.

Conclusions
Statement

Office of Workers’ Compensation Programs: Goals and Monitoring Are Needed to Further

Improve Customer Communications

Page 18 GAO-01-72T

written communications can be made more exacting, and beginning to

reliably measure both customer satisfaction and goal achievement, OWCP

can lay the foundation for better serving its customers’ needs for timely

and accurate information.

We recommend that the Secretary of Labor require the Director of OWCP

to

• establish goals for all important areas of OWCP’s telephone and written

communications with injured workers and other customers and revise as

appropriate existing goals to better ensure that customers’ needs for

accurate and timely information are met;

• collect credible performance data on progress toward these goals,

including timely periodic surveys of injured workers’, medical providers’,

and agencies’ satisfaction with OWCP’s services and surveys of OWCP

employees to gauge their job satisfaction and to gather ideas on how to

improve services; and

• use these performance data and survey results to identify areas needing

improvement and to develop strategies for achieving those improvements,

including new and revised goals where appropriate.

OWCP’s Acting Director said that he agreed with our recommendations

and would continue to explore ways in which to improve customer

communications.

That concludes my statement, Mr. Chairman. I would be happy to answer

any questions that you or other Members of the Subcommittee may have.

For further contacts regarding this testimony, please contact Michael

Brostek at (202) 512-9039 or Alan Stapleton at (202) 512-3418. Individuals

making key contributions to this testimony included Jeanne Barger,

Thomas Davies Jr., James Turkett, Michael Valle, and Cleofas Zapata Jr.

Recommendations for

Executive Action

Contacts and

Acknowledgements
Page 19 GAO-01-72T
Appendix I

Scope and Methodology

Page 20 GAO-01-72T

To determine how OWCP communicates with injured federal workers,

agencies who employed these workers, and medical and other service

providers who are involved in their treatment, we performed the following

audit steps.

We placed 2,400 telephone calls to OWCP’s 12 district offices (200 per

office), to assess the accessibility of telephone representatives at each of

the 12 OWCP district offices and whether each office’s automated

integrated voice response (IVR) system’s data was consistent with the

national office’s claim data. We generated listings for our callers which

provided the dates, times, and phone numbers to be called, and when

applicable, the claim information to be accessed. OWCP provided

information about the breakdown of IVR call types for four of the twelve

OWCP district offices (Chicago, Philadelphia, Kansas City, and Seattle)

during a 2-month period. We used this information to build a

nongeneralizable profile of the distribution of IVR calls across the

following six types of claim information for each district office (number of

calls per district office in parentheses):

• claimant calling about a bill payment ( 47),

• medical provider calling about a bill payment (8),

• medical provider calling about a periodic roll payment (24),

• claimant calling about a compensation check (10),

• claimant calling about physical therapy authorization (2), and

• medical provider calling about physical therapy authorization (9).

For the IVR calls, we were provided with identifiers, such as claim

numbers and employer identification numbers, that enabled us to enter the

IVR and identify specific transactions on each office’s automated database.

We worked with OWCP to identify a time period of earlier transactions

from the national database that would still exist in each district office’s

IVR system during our test period in June and July 2000. OWCP sampled

records from their national database for this time period until they

obtained the required number of records of each type, for each district

office. OWCP’s selection of IVR cases did not strictly constitute a random

sample of cases for each office from the specified time period, since the

cases were selected in case number order, which generally reflected a

chronological order, until the required number of cases was obtained.

However, since we had no reason to believe that time ordering of the cases

was associated with whether a district office’s IVR data would match the

information in the national database, we accepted OWCP’s selections for

use in our test.
Appendix I

Scope and Methodology

Page 21 GAO-01-72T

All of our test calls attempted to reach an OWCP representative, either

directly or after accessing the IVR system. We therefore randomly

scheduled all our test calls only during the hours that each office told us

that a “live” representative should be available to respond to customer

inquiries. Saturdays, Sundays, and Tuesday, July 4, 2000, were excluded

from our test days.

For district offices that had the same telephone number for the automated

voice response system and for a representative, we called that number 200

times and attempted to reach a representative immediately upon accessing

the system on 100 of those calls and attempted to access claim information

on the automated system and then access a representative on the other 100

calls. For offices that had separate numbers for the automated voice

response system and the representative, we called each number 100 times.

As before, upon completion of the automated voice response system, we

attempted to reach a representative. All representatives contacted were

informed that they had participated in a GAO telephone survey. When

attempting to access an OWCP office’s telephone system, we let the

telephone ring 15 times (over 1 minute) before making the determination

that the telephone system did not answer. And, in waiting for a

representative to answer the line, we waited at least 5 minutes after

making the selection to speak to a representative before determining that

the call was not answered. We used the 5 minute time period because we

wanted to be more conservative than VBA’s goal of a caller’s accessing a

representative within 3 minutes and NPR’s guidance and Ohio’s BWC’s

goal of 30 seconds. For each call, we recorded how successful the district

office was in providing services an injured worker or medical provider

might desire. The information recorded included busy signals, no answer

after 1 minute, whether we reached an office representative, whether we

reached the automated voice response system, and whether consistent

information was provided about the claimant by that system, such as the

amount of a medical payment or the status of medical authorization for

physical therapy. We conducted this telephone survey over a 6-week

period in June and July 2000, and attempted the calls throughout the

business hours listed for each district office.

If the test calls we made were considered random samples of customers’

telephone experiences during the test period, the following statements

could be made about the precision of the estimates:

• Estimates of the proportion of calls in each district in which customers

were unable to access the telephone systems, and the proportion of
Appendix I

Scope and Methodology

Page 22 GAO-01-72T

calls in each district in which customers were unable to reach an

employee within five minutes, have sampling errors of no more than 10

percentage points.

• Estimates of the proportion of IVR calls with consistent data (among

IVR calls for which transactions could be tested) have sampling errors

of no more than 10 percentage points unless otherwise noted in table

II.1.

The data we collected, however, were from test calls rather than “actual”

customer calls. Characteristics of the test calls that might affect the

outcomes we measured, such as time of day, day of week, or subject

matter, might not have mirrored the profile of these characteristics among

“actual” customers’ phone calls in any district during the test period.

Therefore, the results displayed for individual districts might differ from

the ones we might have obtained by sampling “actual” customer calls, by

amounts larger than the stated sampling errors.

• At OWCP’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., we interviewed

knowledgeable officials, reviewed strategic and operational plans for fiscal

years 1995 through 2000 to identify goals and measures related to

responding to customer inquiries, and obtained communication reports

showing data that would indicate OWCP’s performance for the same

period. We also discussed with these officials methods for testing the

communications at OWCP district offices, and obtained claimant and

medical provider information so that we could perform a telephone survey

of the 12 district offices.

• We visited 5 of the 12 OWCP district offices—Chicago, Dallas, San

Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. At these five offices, we

conducted an in-depth review; we interviewed regional directors, district

directors, claims managers, claims examiners, and workers compensation

assistants to gain an understanding of the communications at OWCP from

various perspectives. We obtained available communication reports,

accountability review reports, reports measuring written and telephone

communication performance, and other applicable communication data.

We selected the five offices based on several factors to obtain a mixture of

offices of differing sizes and levels of performance. The primary factors

were (1) the number of employees and the number of cases managed at

these offices, which ranged from among the lowest to among the highest of

all the district offices; (2) OWCP’s telephone and written responsiveness
Appendix I

Scope and Methodology

Page 23 GAO-01-72T

measures, which indicated that some offices had and some had not met

national performance goals; and (3) the proximity of two of the offices to

our Washington, D.C., and Dallas Regional Office staff.

• We surveyed the other seven district offices--Boston, Cleveland, Denver,

Jacksonville, Kansas City, New York, and Philadelphia--via a questionnaire

and obtained general information about their communication practices,

such as the number of employees each assigned to respond to telephone

calls.

• To compare OWCP’s goals and practices for telephone communication

with those of leading organizations, we also surveyed three agencies that

have won awards for their telephone communication practices: the Social

Security Administration, Department of Veterans Affairs’ Bureau of

Benefits Administration, and state of Ohio’s Bureau of Workers’

Compensation (BWC). We asked OWCP and the three agencies to identify

which of 95 telephone “best practices” they used that NPR identified in a

1995 study. We did not attempt to verify or validate their responses. In

addition, we interviewed and obtained documents on communication

performance goals and practices from officials at the three organizations

and compared OWCP’s performance goals and measures with those of

private sector organizations identified in the NPR study and those of the

three organizations we surveyed.

We did our work between January and September 2000 in accordance with

generally accepted government auditing standards.
Appendix II

Access Rates For And Accuracy Of OWCP

District Offices’ Automated Interactive Voice

Response Systems

Page 24 GAO-01-72T

District office

Number of calls

made to attempt

access to IVR

Number of calls able

to access IVR

Number of calls able

to complete IVR

Number of

transactions testeda

Number

(percentage) of

transactions with

consistent datab

Bostonc 100 100 98 59 55(93)

Chicagoc 100 79 77 51 48(94)

Clevelandc 100 93 91 54 49(91)d

Dallasc 100 95 95 51 48(94)

Denver 100 96 96 60 56(93)

Jacksonvillec 100 84 63 32 28(88)e

Kansas City 100 93 93 59 58(98)

New Yorkc 100 90 90 52 47(90)d

Philadelphia 100 95 81 46 44(96)

San Francisco 100 63 63 31 31(100)d

Seattle 100 99 97 59 55(93)

Washington DC 100 75 75 42 42(100)

Totalsf1200 1062 1019 596 561(94)

a

Although we made 100 calls to each district, the number of transactions tested at each district are

less than 100 because either we could not access the automated voice response system (e.g., busy

signals, no answer, etc.), could not complete the transaction (e.g., lost connection, system rejected

claim input, etc.), or the system had been updated by more recent data, (i.e., information was updated

after OWCP provided the sample claims).

b We compared data obtained from automated voice response system with claim data provided by the

national office and determined whether each district office’s system’s data were consistent with the

national office’s claim data. We did not independently verify the accuracy of the national office's data.

c The district office had separate telephone numbers for accessing the automated interactive voice

response system and accessing an OWCP representative. The other district offices had only one

main number.

d If the test calls were considered as a random sample, the lower bound of the sampling error

associated with this estimate is 11 percentage points less than the value of the estimate.

 e If the test calls were considered as a random sample, the lower bound of the sampling error

associated with this estimate is 16 percentage points less than the value of the estimate.

f

 An average for all OWCP district offices cannot be provided, because OWCP could not provide the

total number of telephone calls each office received, and thus we could not weight the sample to

accurately reflect the impact of each district office’s performance on a national average.

Source: GAO analysis of telephone survey.

Table II.1: Number of GAO Survey Telephone Calls Able to Access and Complete OWCP Interactive Voice Response (IVR)

Systems, Number of Transactions Tested, and Number of Transactions With Consistent Claims Data by District Office
Page 25 GAO-01-72T
Page 26 GAO-01-72T
Page 27 GAO-01-72T
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