Case Study: New Jersey Department of Community Affairs achieves rapid $127M utility relief distribution with IBM Consulting

The State of New Jersey and IBM Consulting make it easier for citizens to stay warm

The New Jersey Department of Community Affairs (DCA) faced a sudden, large-scale need to administer the Utility Debt Relief Arrearage Forgiveness Program after the American Rescue Plan expanded eligibility, creating far more applicants than existing staff could handle. DCA engaged IBM — primarily IBM Consulting using IBM watsonx Assistant, IBM Blueworks Live, IBM Services for Microsoft and NICE CXone integrated with Dynamics 365 on Microsoft Azure — to rapidly build multilingual portals, a call center and an adjudication workflow.

IBM delivered English and Spanish arrearage portals, a CCaaS contact center with watsonx Assistant and NICE CXone, and Blueworks Live‑driven adjudication integrated into Dynamics 365, launching an initial platform in weeks and iterating via Agile. In the first 10 months DCA processed about 50,000 applications and dispersed more than USD 127M, handled over 273,000 calls while the IBM virtual agent handles ~6,200 calls/month (saving >800 hours), and provided dashboards and analytics that improved staff allocation and application throughput.

New Jersey Department of Community Affairs

John Harrison

Director of Information Technology