Case Study: Michigan Office of Child Support reduces call volume by 45% and slashes response times with Nuance Communications

Michigan OCS delivers great service to citizens

The Michigan Office of Child Support faced growing case backlogs, frequent phone-tag delays, long caller wait times and rising noncompliance that kept families from timely benefits. To address these challenges it partnered with Nuance Communications to deploy a Nuance Natural Language Understanding (NLU) call-steering IVR and revamped case-intake processes so callers could use conversational speech to describe their needs.

Nuance Communications implemented an NLU IVR that verifies callers, gathers case data, routes calls to the first available specialist and pushes case info via CTI screen pops; Nuance also supported voice UI design and tuning. The result: average response time fell from about two weeks to five minutes, incoming call volume dropped ~45%, escalations to managers fell 90%, requests for administrative hearings due to noncompliance declined 66%, and noncompliance letters were cut roughly in half — improving first-call resolution and specialist productivity.

Michigan Office of Child Support

Erin Frisch

Director