“… Trump and Bisignano also touted achievements in customer service, specifically claiming recent reductions in wait times for the 1-800 phone line and at field offices as well as the elimination of scheduled maintenance times for the website.
… Advocates have said it is harder to tell what customer service is like since the agency has taken down many of its public-facing performance metrics.
To trumpet the phone performance, the agency has said it reduced the “average speed to answer,” which does not count the time callers wait for a call back, even though the agency rolled out the callback feature last year.
The agency also said it cut wait times at field offices, a statistic repeated by Trump on Thursday.
That is misleading, according Jessica LaPointe, president of Council 220 of the American Federation of Government Employees. After the agency rolled out a new system of assigning appointments to people walking into field offices in December, the time people wait in the lobby of field offices went down because they were no longer getting their issues handled when they showed up.
“Now you wait 20 minutes in the lobby to get to the window and then you’re given an appointment and you are waiting then months to get your business finished, from start to finish,” LaPointe said.…”