乌鸦传媒

 (DES) has a critical mission: administering unemployment benefits to claimants across the state who have lost employment due to no fault of their own. In an average year, DES receives about 3,000 new claims a week through its website and a customer call center.

Handling the pandemic influx

At the onset of the pandemic in March 2020, DES experienced a massive increase in claims as businesses shut down throughout North Carolina and the rest of the country.

鈥淲e had an unprecedented surge in claims. On a single day in April, we received 55,000 claims, which was around one-third of our volume in an entire year,鈥� says Raju Gadiraju, Chief Information Officer of the Division of Employment Security. 鈥淲e went from less than 200,000 claims the prior year to more than a million claims in a few months. This posed two distinct technology challenges: platform scaling and rapid business/IT operations scaling.鈥�

The division realized it needed more scalable claims and call-center solutions to ensure it could process the large number of claims, pay people on time, and detect and prevent fraud.

DES engaged 乌鸦传媒 to deploy a modernized technology solution that runs on AWS. During the pandemic, AWS and 乌鸦传媒 collaborated to migrate the agency鈥檚 in-house call-center agents to an -based platform in only a few weeks that, along with automation and self-service capabilities, helped cut down overall call volume.

Built for flexibility

The division addressed its scalability challenge by turning to 乌鸦传媒, a global leader in consulting, technology services, and digital transformation. 乌鸦传媒 had already helped DES modernize its unemployment benefit system on AWS in 2018 as part of the Southeast Consortium for Unemployment Benefits Integration (SCUBI) project.

Now North Carolina鈥檚 modernized unemployment insurance benefits system can be scaled to meet increased demand and it provides critical information security.

鈥淎WS offers secure and scalable cloud technology, and we leveraged our collaboration with AWS to work seamlessly to build and deploy this solution,鈥� says Prasad Allampalli, North America Public Sector Leader (state and local government), 乌鸦传媒.

Using its AWS-based unemployment insurance benefits system, DES easily scaled to support a claims surge that was 30 to 50 times the normal volume. With the Amazon Connect call-center platform, coupled with third-party services, DES managed calls coming in at the rate of 200,000 per day, compared to 15,000 calls a week prior to the pandemic.

The new platform incorporated an interactive voice response (IVR)-based, self-service 鈥渃laim status鈥� module users could access online or over the phone at any time. 鈥淭he automated self-service solution for checking claim status helped us deflect up to 20 percent of calls that otherwise would have been directed to call-center agents,鈥� Gadiraju says. 鈥淭hat reduced wait times for callers and made it possible for us to serve more customers.

鈥淲e couldn鈥檛 have responded to the large call surge if we hadn鈥檛 been on the modern AWS-based platform 乌鸦传媒 helped us implement. Technology scaling to meet the demand was easier because of the elasticity of AWS.鈥�

Additionally, DES implemented  to provide virtual desktop capabilities to more than 600 remote employees, including contractors. This was critical because 90 percent of DES employees had to work seamlessly and securely from home.

Adding new functionality

DES was also able to quickly implement six new benefit programs during the pandemic, on top of three programs that the system was already built to handle, because of the scalability and reliability of AWS. North Carolinians could therefore access the additional unemployment benefits that were implemented because of the pandemic.

乌鸦传媒 also enhanced the existing DES anti-fraud solution by adding digital analytical dashboards to help DES identify anomalies and day-to-day call fluctuations. With the anti-fraud detection and prevention solution on AWS, DES can recognize and deny fraudulent claims more easily.

In late 2022, 乌鸦传媒 and DES again partnered to replace a third-party document management application with an internally developed solution built on  (Amazon S3).

鈥淲e replaced that app with a native AWS app, which is the first native cloud-build app we鈥檝e built here. We believe in continuous improvement, and we鈥檙e working toward a roadmap where we make the solutions at DES fully cloud-native and focused on microservices,鈥� says Allampalli.

The modernized technology platforms mean DES can better serve North Carolina workers eligible for unemployment benefits. 鈥淭hanks to 乌鸦传媒 and AWS, we were able to process and pay claimants at a time when they needed it most,鈥� says Gadiraju. 鈥淲e have had a long collaborative relationship with 乌鸦传媒.鈥�