State of Illinois: Using AI to help residents impacted by COVID-19 receive unemployment benefits
About the State of Illinois
The Illinois Department of Employment Security’s mission is to encourage the economic growth and stability for state residents and employers. The agency administers the state’s unemployment benefits, runs the employment service and Illinois job bank, and publishes labor market data.
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Contact usThe Illinois Department of Employment Security is using Contact Center AI to rapidly deploy virtual agents to help more than 1 million citizens who lost their jobs to file unemployment claims.
Google Cloud results
- The state of Illinois anticipates an estimated annual savings of $100M based on an initial analysis of IDES’s virtual agent data
- Virtual agents handle more than 140,000 phone and web inquiries per day
- Phone virtual agent answers 40,000 after-hours calls per night
- Illinois residents can get help to file their unemployment claims faster
- Contact Center AI web and phone virtual agents each deployed in just two weeks
Virtual agents help hundreds of thousands get unemployment benefits
When the COVID-19 virus spread throughout the US, it devastated the job market, driving millions of Americans into unemployment within weeks. State governments across the country suddenly faced an unprecedented surge in unemployment benefits claims.
In the state of Illinois, the number of COVID-19-related unemployment claims submitted between March 1 and May 9, 2020, totaled 1,076,461, which is nearly 11.5 times the number of claims the department processed during the same period in 2019.
For the Illinois Department of Employment Security (IDES), which administers the state’s unemployment benefits, this led to a deluge of phone calls and web inquiries from residents. The surge was compounded by the state’s shelter-in-place order, which prohibited residents from visiting IDES offices to file their claims in person.
“Because of COVID-19, our constituents were unable to walk into a state office, so the increase in web and phone inquiries was astronomical,” said Jennifer Ricker, Acting Assistant Secretary for the Illinois Department of Innovation and Technology (DoIT). Illinois DoIT is responsible for providing technology, innovation, and telecommunications services to all Illinois state agencies.
Contact Center AI virtual agents assist human staff
As overburdened IDES contact center agents strained to answer phone calls and respond to web inquiries, constituents contacting the agency for unemployment assistance waited for hours on the phone, or simply didn’t get through. Realizing the urgency of the problem, Illinois mobilized a cross-functional response team to find and deploy a solution fast.
The state of Illinois chose Contact Center AI, a conversational AI solution from Google Cloud. Contact Center AI uses artificial intelligence to enable rich conversational experiences between virtual agents and customers through chat and over the phone.
Working with Google Cloud, Ricker and her team developed a three-phase plan to deploy Contact Center AI virtual agents on the IDES website and through the agency’s phone system. In phase one, the Contact Center AI virtual agents were designed to answer frequently asked questions regarding constituents’ unemployment claims.
Three Google Cloud partners played key roles in designing and deploying the solution. Quantiphi, which specializes in applied AI and machine learning, helped launch the web virtual agent; and Presidio, a digital transformation IT solution provider, assisted with the phone agent. Additionally, the team used Cisco Contact Center AI APIs to connect the Dialogflow bot to IDES’s Cisco contact center and communications system.
Contact Center AI quickly augments legacy technology
It took only two weeks to deploy each virtual agent—for a total rollout time of four weeks. In addition to quickly integrating Contact Center AI with existing technology, the DoIT team was also helping state employees transition to remote work due to COVID-19.
“We not only faced very tight timelines to launch the Contact Center AI virtual agents, but we also had to integrate with legacy technology while helping our employees as they transitioned to working from home,” said Brandon Ragle, Chief of Enterprise Applications for the Illinois Department of Innovation and Technology.
IDES completed phase one in mid-April when they launched their web virtual agent and phase two in late April when their phone virtual agent started answering after-hours phone calls. Phase three will connect the phone and web virtual agents to IDES’s backend systems to handle more complex requests, such as password resets, inquiries about check claim status, and changes to constituent records.
“The ease with which our teams were able to quickly integrate Contact Center AI on our legacy technology was a pleasant surprise,” Ricker added.
“The automated virtual agents have acted like a force multiplier for IDES’s support agents, in terms of processing and responding to unemployment benefits requests.”
—Jennifer Ricker, Acting Assistant Secretary, Illinois Department of Innovation & TechnologyVirtual agents help thousands file unemployment claims
As the economic impact of COVID-19 reverberated across Illinois, IDES’s website traffic spiked from 50,000 page views per day to millions.
Fortunately, IDES’s newly deployed virtual contact center agents provided immediate help. IDES reports that the phone virtual agent consistently processes an average of 40,000 constituent phone calls per night. And the web chatbot interacts with upwards of 100,000 constituents a day.
By absorbing these constituent inquiries, Contact Center AI is helping many thousands of Illinois residents get important information on their unemployment claims quickly. It’s also alleviating the demand on IDES’s human agents to answer common and repetitive questions, enabling them to focus on more complex cases.
As Ricker put it, “The automated virtual agents have acted like a force multiplier for IDES’s support agents, in terms of processing and responding to unemployment benefits requests.”
“We’ve had digital transformation projects like Contact Center AI on our vision road map for a while, but now that we’ve proven how quickly we can deploy the virtual agents, we realize we can accelerate our digital transformation strategy.”
—Brandon Ragle, Chief of Enterprise Applications, Illinois Department of Innovation & TechnologyMomentum for digital transformation and omnichannel support
IDES’s successful rollout of Contact Center AI is helping the agency achieve their immediate priority, which is ensuring Illinois residents get their unemployment benefits quickly in a time of crisis.
According to IDES, the web virtual agent answered 3.2 million inquiries in its first two weeks, helping them pay unemployment benefits in a timely manner to 99.99% of claimants. Seventy-five percent of claimants received their first payment within two weeks. And the project’s success is creating positive ripple effects in other areas too.
For one, with virtual agents now assisting more than 100,000 constituents a day, the DoIT team is thinking more seriously about how they can serve constituents in an omnichannel way.
“The benefits we’re seeing with the web and phone virtual agents has really led us to think in a more omnichannel manner, as opposed to viewing each of these channels as separate and independent,” said Ricker.
The team’s ability to quickly integrate Contact Center AI with their legacy technology stack—without any major snags—has also added momentum to the DoIT’s digital transformation efforts.
“Don’t fear the unknown. We’ve had to push ourselves through some internal processes, and we’re generally very cautious with our contact centers, but working with Google Cloud has been a great experience.”
—Dale Walters, Chief of Network Operations, Illinois Department of Innovation & Technology“We’ve had digital transformation projects like Contact Center AI on our vision road map for a while, but now that we’ve proven how quickly we can deploy the virtual agents, we realize we can accelerate our digital transformation strategy,” said Ragle.
Network Operations Chief Dale Walters summed up the team’s sentiment on a philosophical note: “Don’t fear the unknown. We’ve had to push ourselves through some internal processes, and we’re generally very cautious with our contact centers, but working with Google Cloud has been a great experience.”
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About the State of Illinois
The Illinois Department of Employment Security’s mission is to encourage the economic growth and stability for state residents and employers. The agency administers the state’s unemployment benefits, runs the employment service and Illinois job bank, and publishes labor market data.