SSA will get call wait times down to ‘single digits’ using AI, commissioner tells employees

The new head of the Social Security Administration is looking to get call wait times down to “single digits,” as part of this strategy to make the agency a “digital-first organization.”

An SSA official told Federal News Network that the agency’s monthly average call wait time dropped from 30 minutes in January to just about 12 minutes in May, when including callers who were given a “callback” option and didn’t have to remain on hold. SSA counts callbacks as a zero-minute wait time on its customer service metrics.

SSA Commissioner Frank Bisignano told employees in an all-hands meeting on Thursday that this has been the agency’s “best performance” since it started tracking these metrics. But said he plans to cut call wait times to a fraction of that using artificial intelligence tools.

“We’re going to get that thing down to single digits,” he said.

According to its 800 number performance dashboard, SSA’s average speed to answer calls, so far in fiscal 2025, is about 20 minutes, and less than half of all calls are answered. SSA answers about 390,000 calls each day.

An SSA employee, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media, said about 70% of the agency’s callers are handled by callbacks.

At the time of reporting, the current wait time for a caller to reach an SSA representative is an hour and 38 minutes, if the caller chooses to remain on the line and doesn’t request a callback. For callers who do request a callback, it takes SSA about an hour and 36 minutes to call them back. More than 3,259 callers who didn’t opt for a callback are waiting on hold, and more than 22,000 callers are waiting for a callback.

Bisignano, a former Wall Street executive who led a financial tech company before joining the Trump administration, told employees he was “using AI before it was AI,” and oversaw financial organizations that processed a higher volume of payments than SSA does.

“Much bigger orgs, much bigger problems — but not as important. Can you see the difference? Here we do $1.5 trillion a year. In my last job, we did $2.5 trillion a day. This is more important than that, though,” he said.

“I understand the work you do. I may have not done it in the federal government, but it’s the same work,” he added.

Bisignano said he’s also focused on driving down a backlog of more than 6 million pending actions, and will tour a processing center in Queens, New York, on Friday.

An SSA official said these tasks at SSA processing centers “require further manual development and cannot be automated.”

“I’m going to go look at why we have 6.1 million items in backlog. That’s going away. We’ll use tools, we’ll keep rolling it out,” Bisignano said. “We’re going to win at field offices, we’re going to win at call centers. We’re going to win at processing centers. And I promise I will roll up my sleeves and work, because I actually know how to do this.”

Bisignano said SSA will be able to implement new tools and provide better customer service to beneficiaries within his first year on the job.

“This is a six-year term, but it’s going to be less than a one-year job. I’m not saying we’re going to be done with this in a year. Doesn’t mean I’m leaving in a year, but that’s my time frame for this. We’ve waited too long. There’s too many items in the backlog. There’s too many people waiting,” he said.

SSA faces a growing workload. Former President Joe Biden signed the Social Security Fairness Act into law before leaving office in January, which gives larger monthly Social Security payments to 3 million public sector employees, retirees, spouses and surviving spouses.

The legislation eliminated the Windfall Elimination Provision and Government Pension Offset — two longstanding provisions of Social Security that reduce or eliminate benefits for certain government retirees, including Civil Service Retirement System annuitants, as well as teachers, firefighters, police officers and others who have worked in a public sector position.

An SSA official said delivering benefits to eligible individuals under the Social Security Fairness Act is a “priority workload,” and that the agency has used automation to expedite over $15.1 billion in “long-delayed retroactive payments” to more than 2.3 million individuals affected by WEP and GPO.

The official said SSA is “working to exceed” its estimate that this workload will be completed by early November, and is prioritizing 360,000 “more complex cases” that could not be processed through automation.

“These cases require additional time to manually update the records and pay both retroactive benefits and the new benefits amount,” the official said.

An SSA employee, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media, told Federal News Network that the agency has started a “massive push” to process these 360,000 cases, “at the expense of other workloads.”

The agency official, however, said “SSA is not setting aside or deferring work as it prioritizes the SSFA cases.”

Bisignano told employees that SSA will overhaul its “MySSA” website, so that more beneficiaries — primarily retirees and Americans with disabilities — can get their questions answered online, instead of over the phone or in person at field offices.

“I want to know every transaction that’s done on the phone or in a field office that actually can be done on the web,” he said.

Before Bisignano took office, SSA under the Trump administration proposed and walked back several plans to limit the agency’s level of phone support to beneficiaries — forcing them to either seek help in-person at field offices or online.

Recent analysis from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities finds that more than a quarter of senior citizens in the United States live more than an hour’s drive away from their nearest SSA field office, and more than half live 30 minutes away from the closest facility.

SSA in mid-April launched an AI “anti-fraud” check on all claims filed over the phone, which added an extra three days to processing.

SSA currently has its lowest level of staffing in 50 years, but Bisignano said the agency will increase its IT modernization spending to acquire tools that will make employees more productive.

“I’m glad that we’re in business together — and yes, it’s okay to call government business. We need to modernize everything we do. And yes, we’ll spend the money on it, and I can guarantee you that your job will become better,” he said.

SSA received the lowest employee satisfaction scores among large agencies last year, according to data compiled by the Partnership for Public Service’s Best Places to Work in the Federal Government scorecard.

Bisignano said SSA’s upcoming IT investments will give employees the tools they need to do their jobs effectively and will improve morale.

“We’re going to invest in you, we’re going to invest in your work. We’re going to invest in a client experience, if I may call it that. And when the employee experience improves and the client experience improves, you’re winning, right? We could be the model agency,” he said.

The Trump administration is proposing a $12.7 billion budget for SSA in fiscal 2026 — a flat budget, compared to its current spending levels. But Bisignano said SSA will secure the funding for IT modernization, because these improvements are a priority for President Donald Trump.

“It is very important to the President that Social Security performs great,” he said.

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