Customer success in government
A white paper on rehabilitating Tennessee's unemployment insurance program — what the symptoms concealed, what the root causes were, and what changed when the department started measuring the claimant's journey in real time.
In 2013 the Tennessee Department of Labor and Workforce Development had 1,300 employees and a $210 million budget, serving 6.6 million residents and 120,000 businesses across six functional areas — one of which was unemployment insurance.
Historically, the answer had been more positions and more funding.
That never ended the symptoms and never resolved the problems — like taking aspirin for a headache while the illness causing it goes untreated. We took the opposite approach: identify the root causes, eliminate those, and the symptoms go with them.
- 64,000-claim backlogMarch 2013
Eligible claimants waiting six, ten, twelve months or more for payments they needed.
- 800,000+ calls a monthVolume
Not unique callers — the same people redialing, 40,000 calls a day against 67 claims agents.
- A 42-year-old COBOL systemTechnology
Threatening to collapse at any moment, with no real-time view of a claimant's journey.
- 1.6 million paper documentsProcess
500,000 pieces of paper arriving monthly plus 1,130,000 already stacked up or on microfiche — with no microfiche reader in the building.
Six measurements the legacy systems could not produce.
Serving both internal customers (employees) and external customers (claimants) required technology that measured every transaction across the journey in real time — and used that data to change how service was delivered while it was happening.
- Subject, not just volume
The topic of every inquiry, and the volume per topic.
- Response speed by channel
How quickly an inquiry was answered regardless of how it arrived.
- Touch count
How many touches, and by whom, a full resolution required.
- Time to resolve
How long it took to resolve the issue or provide the information.
- Satisfaction in real time
How satisfied the customer was with the service just delivered.
- A complete journey record
A personal profile with every step, touch, and word of the journey.
The expectation gap was the real backlog.
Federal rules allowed 21 days to process a claim. The department had never communicated that; claimants learned it only by calling. Once status was visible online, 85% of inquiries stopped being necessary. Two large vendors had proposed $100,000 and $300,000 just for months of assessment and design, without the management tools the chosen omnichannel platform delivered in a week.
- 85% of tickets removedDeflection
Once claimants could check claim status themselves — the way a parcel carrier shows a shipment — the largest category of contact disappeared.
- Implementation in under a weekSpeed
Email and help desk support live, with 35 agents trained, in less than a week. Useful reporting arrived within two hours of turn-on.
- Root cause in an hour, not monthsDiagnosis
When CSAT fell from 85% to 43% overnight, the data traced it to a website change that buried the status link three clicks deep. Fixed within the hour.
- One record across every channelOmnichannel
Phone, email, web forms, chat, and social interactions funneled into a single customer view instead of parallel silos.
The conditions described here are not unique to one state or one program — every agency with a paper-centric intake and no real-time journey data eventually produces the same backlog. The method transfers: measure the journey, set honest expectations, remove the contact reason rather than staffing up to answer it. We apply the same approach in our public sector practice.
Want the full paper or a walkthrough for your leadership team?
Tell us the program and the pain, and we will send the complete white paper and a short assessment outline.
Hendersonville, TN · Mon–Fri