Capgemini Leverages the Power of AWS to Help North Carolina Process More Than 1 Million Unemployment Claims

The North Carolina Division of Employment Security engaged Capgemini to deploy a modernized technology solution that runs on AWS. During the COVID-19 pandemic, AWS and Capgemini collaborated to migrate the agency’s in-house call center agents to an Amazon Connect–based platform in a few weeks that, along with automation and self-service capabilities, helped cut down overall call volume by up to 20 percent.

The North Carolina Department of Commerce, Division of Employment Security (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.

At the onset of the global pandemic in March 2020, DES suddenly experienced a massive increase in claims as businesses shut down throughout North Carolina and the rest of the United States. “We 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,” says Raju Gadiraju, chief information officer of the Division of Employment Security. “We 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.”

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

The division addressed its scalability challenge by turning to longtime AWS Partner Capgemini and global IT services and consulting organization. Capgemini 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. “We have had a long collaborative relationship with Capgemini.” Gadiraju says.

North Carolina’s modernized unemployment insurance benefits system can be scaled up to meet increased demand and provides critical information security. “AWS offers secure and scalable cloud technology, and we leveraged our collaboration with AWS to work seamlessly to build and deploy this solution,” says Prasad Allampalli, North America public sector leader (state and local government) at Capgemini.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the partners worked with an AWS team to deploy a new call center platform for DES based on Amazon Connect. The platform incorporated an interactive voice response (IVR)–based, self-service “claim status” module that allowed users to check their claim status online or over the phone at any time. This helped deflect the need for human interventions for the most-asked questions, thereby reducing the call volume by approximately 20 percent at an average daily call volume of up to 200,000 calls during the pandemic.

Additionally, DES implemented Amazon WorkSpaces to provide virtual desktop capabilities to more than 600 remote employees, including contractors. “Amazon WorkSpaces was critical because 90 percent of our employees had to work seamlessly and securely from home when the pandemic started,” Gadiraju says.

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 call center services, DES was able to manage calls coming in at the rate of 200,000 per day, compared to 15,000 calls a week prior to the pandemic. “We couldn’t have responded to the large call surge if we hadn’t been on the modern AWS-based platform Capgemini helped us implement,” says Gadiraju. “Technology scaling to meet the demand was easier because of the elasticity of AWS.”

Because of the modernized technology platforms, DES can better serve North Carolina workers eligible for unemployment benefits. “Thanks to Capgemini and AWS, we were able to process and pay claimants at a time when they needed it most,” says Gadiraju. The new DES platform was also available around the clock for claimants. “We would have been in trouble had this not been on AWS,” says Gadiraju. “We have had little to no downtime since going live, and that’s a big advantage for people applying for benefits.”

DES was able to quickly implement six new benefit programs during the pandemic, on top three programs that the system was already built to handle because of the scalability and reliability of AWS. As a result, eligible North Carolinians had access to additional unemployment benefits made available during the pandemic.

By relying on the self-service features in its automated call center, DES reduced both the large volume of incoming support calls and the amount of human interaction required to assist claimants. “The 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,” Gadiraju says. “That reduced wait times for callers and made it possible for us to serve more customers.”

Capgemini 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 our anti-fraud detection and prevention solution on AWS, we can recognize and deny fraudulent claims,” says Gadiraju.

In late 2022, Capgemini and DES again partnered to replace a third-party document management application with an internally developed solution built on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). “We replaced that app with a native AWS app, which is the first native cloud-build app we’ve built here. We believe in continuous improvement, and we’re working toward a roadmap where we make the solutions at DES fully cloud-native and focused on microservices,” says Allampalli. “We will keep working with AWS to make this solution even more successful for North Carolina.”