What You Need to Know: The Employment Development Department launched a more customer-friendly online unemployment application with fewer questions, less jargon, and simpler questions and instructions.
SACRAMENTO – The Employment Development Department (EDD) just released a simpler online application for unemployment benefits—another step in modernizing California’s benefit programs and improving the customer experience.
“We’re simplifying California’s unemployment application to serve our customers better,” said EDD Director Nancy Farias. “This new application is easier to understand and faster to complete.”
Unemployment Insurance is one of the more complex public benefit programs, with detailed state and federal requirements. As a result, the application was often considered complex and confusing. In response, EDD asked customers, employees, and advocates for ideas to make the application easier, and then:
- Added simpler explanations to technical terms.
- Clarified questions that many people found confusing.
- Reorganized questions to improve the overall customer experience.
- Eliminated some questions and simplified instructions.
- Replaced many open-ended questions with more specific drop-down options.
For example, many customers have trouble with technical terms and incorrectly say they were “laid off” from a job, yet the actual reason was something else. These imprecise answers caused payment delays because EDD had to seek more information. EDD fixed this by clearly defining terms people use for leaving a job.
EDD also reorganized the application and revised the headings to guide customers through the process and gather all information needed for application review. EDD revised hard-to-understand questions like “Which employer did you work for the longest?” to address situations like intermittent employment. Technical terms were replaced with plain language.
These improvements—and many others—will also help EDD process applications more quickly and pay customers faster.
EDD’s work to improve customers’ experiences aligns with the State’s plain language equity standard under Governor Newsom’s executive order on equity and discrimination. Plain language makes instructions easier to understand, and EDD forms easier to complete. Plain language also makes translations into languages other than English easier to understand.
EDD’s ongoing plain language improvements build upon a major success in boosting language access for communities speaking California’s top eight languages. The streamlined online application is also now translated into the top languages spoken in California, including English, Spanish, Armenian, Simplified
Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Korean, Tagalog, and Vietnamese. EDD also has dedicated phone lines connecting call center staff who speak these languages with our customers, free translation services for hundreds more languages, and other expanded Language Access Resources.
These enhancements and more to come are part of EDDNext, an ongoing modernization effort to completely transform the EDD customer and employee experience. EDDNext efforts include updating benefit applications, contact centers, the claims process, policies, procedures, and forms, to make the EDD experience easier and faster. It involves working with customer service experts, such as Amazon Web Services and Salesforce, to ensure EDDNext is forward-thinking and embraces the best technology and practices.