Executive Summary
Ohio’s county-administered benefits and human services call centers are, for many Ohioans, the “front door” to public assistance, where trust in government is either reinforced or eroded in a single interaction. When customers contact these call centers and experience extended waits, high abandon rates, and receive inconsistent answers, the impact is immediate: families cannot get timely help to meet application and renewal timelines, frontline staff absorb avoidable rework, and counties face rising reputational risk as frustration escalates beyond the phone lines.
The Call Center initiative shifted counties from “managing by anecdote” to managing by measures: real-time and historical dashboards enable supervisors to see outliers as they happen, intervene earlier, and coach with facts rather than assumptions. A structured cadence of operational reviews and root-cause analysis helps teams’ separate volume-driven constraints from fixable internal friction.
Operationally, the program produced measurable service improvement across multiple county agencies, especially in Ohio’s largest counties affected by demand volatility. In Franklin and Cuyahoga counties, Average Speed of Answer (ASA) dropped from 65.6 minutes and 62.8 minutes at the start of the interventions to a steady-state range of roughly 20–25 minutes (Cuyahoga) and approximately 20–30 minutes (Franklin) during the period of most sustained improvement. Over the same timeframe, answer rates improved from 45.3% (Franklin) and 53.1% (Cuyahoga) to above 80% at their peak in August 2025, meaning tens of thousands more calls were resolved rather than abandoned or repeated.
To move quickly without imposing a one-size-fits-all model, Ohio used a tiered support approach that aligns support intensity with county need and readiness. In the highest-impact counties, the state conducts Deep Dives: time-bound operational turnarounds that combine performance analysis with onsite discovery (shadowing and staff workshops). Next, the team translates findings into a jointly owned action plan with sustained follow-up to hold gains. For counties that needed a faster on-ramp, Deep Dive Light provides a shorter-duration engagement focused on core call center leading practices, including supervisor routines, performance coaching, queue management fundamentals, and workforce planning education. This includes teaching counties how to use historical call data and standard planning methods (e.g., Erlang-C concepts) to estimate staffing needs for predictable surge periods.
