It was apology time for recordkeeper Accenture during Wednesday’s monthly meeting of the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board, which administers the federal government’s 401k-like Thrift Savings Plan—the largest defined contribution plan in the world with $743 billion in assets and 6.6 million participants.
The TSP’s years-in-the-making move to Accenture Federal Service’s recordkeeping system on June 1 has been much publicized, thanks in large part to repeated criticisms from participants during a very bumpy transition. The new service suffered from a variety of issues right out of the gate, most notably staggeringly long call center wait times and troubles setting up new log-in credentials.
“In the early days of the program’s go-live, the call center experience was not up to the standards of the FRTIB, it wasn’t up to our standards, and it certainly wasn’t the experience that the participants and beneficiaries of the Thrift Savings Plan deserved”
Accenture’s Elaine Beeman
“We want to start with an apology: In the early days of the program’s go-live, the call center experience was not up to the standards of the FRTIB, it wasn’t up to our standards, and it certainly wasn’t the experience that the participants and beneficiaries of the Thrift Savings Plan deserved,” Elaine Beeman, Accenture’s civilian portfolio lead told the board during its Aug. 24 meeting.
She said Accenture has been working “night and day” to fix the issues, and that the recordkeeper is now “very close” to meeting its target metrics.
“We were able to take the ‘high call volume’ message off of the website last week, and we hope now we are in a position to offer the world-class experience participants and beneficiaries deserve.”
As reported by Government Executive, Accenture’s Managing Director-Pension Transformation Owen Davies acknowledged during Wednesday’s meeting that the company severely underestimated call center demand and made setting up TSP.gov accounts too difficult.
“When we went live, all of our work was planning for a certain amount of call volume, and we took the TSP’s largest single volume day in the past, and doubled it, figuring that was a reasonable expectation,” Davies said. “But instead of two times, we got six times the call volume, and we weren’t prepared for that or staffed for that, which led to a really horrible experience for participants.”
Davies went on to say that the second thing Accenture did exacerbated the problem.
“With a mind towards fraud protection, we required everyone to set up new online credentials,” Davies said. “We made that process really cumbersome, and it was really hard for a vast number of users, and that in combination created a really bad situation. Everyone felt it and you felt it and your brand felt it.”
Davies went on to say that Accenture Federal Services changed almost everything about the TSP website when it went live.
“We changed the platform, so all the underlying technologies completely changed,” he said. “We changed the processes [and] the way we actually go about delivering the specifics of the plans. We changed all the people who deliver those processes and operate those platforms. It was a wholesale change.”
Progress since the botched launch has been significant, Davies told the FRTIB board. Currently, the average call wait time for customer service is 24 seconds, down from a staggering two hours on June 1. The TSP ThriftLine is receiving roughly 21,000 calls per day, a figure that is trending downward. Davies said more than two million participants have set up new accounts, and satisfaction with customer service is at 82%. AFS is looking to bring customer satisfaction up to 90%.
FRTIB Chair Michael Gerber told Accenture the board was “very disappointed” with how the rollout unfolded, and while they appreciate the change and vast improvement, they want frequent communication with FRTIB Executive Director Ravindra Deo to monitor progress as well as another update from AFS staff in early 2023.
The troubled rollout prompted a request earlier this month from Reps. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) and Abigail Spanberger, (D-VA) for the U.S. Government Accountability Office to conduct a comprehensive review of the rollout, which is expected to begin in November.
SEE ALSO:
• TSP Recordkeeper Transition Off to Rocky Start
• TSP Millionaire Ranks Thinned by More Than One-Third
• Thrift Savings Plan Gets Much-Needed July Boost
• GOP Launches Last-Ditch Efforts to Block Major TSP Changes Set for June 1