EDD officials showed off the new website at their downtown Sacramento headquarters Thursday. The site, called UI Online, is being launched a year and a half late and has cost more than expected, but aims to greatly reduce the need to call the agency with questions about claims.
“It’s pretty good,” said Amandeep Kaur, one of a small number of Californians who have been given access to it so far. “It’s simple. It’s fast.”
Kaur told KCRA 3 she got laid off in April from a job at Apple in Elk Grove. She tried a few times to reach EDD by phone, waiting roughly 30 minutes for someone to answer, she said. Then, she was given access to the new website, which also comes in a mobile app. Connecting with EDD has been a breeze ever since, Kaur said.
This is the outcome EDD had hoped for in September 2013, when it launched a new software system its employees could use to process unemployment claims. But the version the public would use was delayed after that software launch failed and crippled much of EDD’s work.
“I think it was well worth the wait to finally roll out a system that all our customers can use,” said Sabrina Reed, EDD’s deputy director for unemployment insurance.
The new site, which cost $16 million, lets customers do most of the work of applying for benefits and makes it easier for the agency to contact people online. Of the 15,000 people given access to it so far, only two people have needed help using it, Reed said.
EDD plans to roll out the new site to 100,000 customers at a time, starting this weekend, until all 400,000 people currently receiving benefits have access.
That’s a fraction of the number of people who were collecting benefits during the height of the recession, roughly 1.5 million, according to EDD. That reduction has helped reduce a backlog of claims the agency processes and helped reduce the backlog of calls.
At one time, people may have called as many as 45 times before someone at EDD answered, said the agency’s spokesperson, Loree Levy. Now, that number is down to three times, Levy said.