Handling Volumes of Phone Calls and Paper

[Guest FREE401k]

Our firm, a TPA, has a large 401(k) Plan for a Plan Sponsor who has a high turnover rate. There are usually 800-1000 employment termination distributions each quarter. Terminated employees send us the Request for Withdrawal form, then we instruct the trustee to issue the check. The problem we are having is the volume of phone calls and correspondence in this process. Used to be, both our firm and the Plan Sponsor received hundreds of calls each quarter from people asking if we received their Request for Withdrawal form, then those same people would later call back to find out exactly when their check was going in the mail. We decided to acknowledge each Request for Withdrawal form by mail, and not accept phone calls asking if we received their form, Of course that now means we send out hundreds of acknowledgement letters. And people still call wanting to know if their check has been mailed, even though the acknowledgement letters tells them they should have it within 14 days.

There are root causes here that we as TPA can't do anything about, like the high turnover, and the young, transient workforce who for a variety of reasons are distrustful of the process when they leave the company. We were wondering how others out there handle this process. We have a website and an automated phone system and have tried to think how we could use that to help, but haven't come up with any brilliant ideas.

[Guest MTransue]

I'm not sure what the programming implications would be for these ideas, however I know when I call to check my credit card balances, the voice messaging will tell me how much my payment received was for and as of what date they received it. Would it be possible for you to log in forms received somewhere, and have your voice messaging recite a date received?

Regarding your website, I'm assuming that the participants need a password to access their individual accounts (assuming FBO accounts for this plan). How much trouble would it be to add a date form received field to your site, making it only accessible to the individual participants? Your staff would have to update the websites with the information.

If possible, the date forms are received and date checks are mailed and the amount could be added to a voice messaging system and the individuals' account screens. However, not having intricate programming skills, I'm not sure if this is even feasible or how cost effective it is to implement a system such as this.

[Guest FREE401k]

Thanks for the input. We were trying to stay away from having to update the voice and web systems daily, but as I think more about it, it might be easier than all the letters and phone calls we deal with now. Instead of someone going in and doing letters, maybe they could enter the info into the voice and web database.