By Tami Luhby, CNN

(CNN) — As Social Security Commissioner Frank Bisignano tells it, callers only had to wait an average of 8 minutes to speak to an agent on the phone in July.

“We had a bold goal of single-digit wait time on the calls when they were at 40 minutes,” he said in mid-August at an Oval Office event with President Donald Trump commemorating Social Security’s 90th anniversary, referencing a statistic from the prior fiscal year. “And we did that. This is my 100th day. We did that within 90 days.”

That claim, however, might raise some eyebrows among those who have actually tried to get through to a Social Security representative on the phone recently. The average speed of answer metric doesn’t truly show how long it takes to reach an agent, experts say.

There are multiple ways to measure the amount of time for callers to connect with a Social Security representative, including how long they have to wait on hold or to receive a callback. The agency told CNN that it slashed all types of wait times by at least half in July, when it shifted 1,000 workers to answer the national 800 number.

The formula used to calculate the average speed of answer factors in the amount of time a person waits on hold before electing a call back, in addition to those who wait to speak to a representative, the agency said. Some 74% of calls handled by agents are through callbacks.

That combo skews the statistic lower since the callers can quickly choose the callback option when hold times are long, Kathleen Romig, director of Social Security and disability policy at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, told CNN. So citing that figure alone can be misleading.

“It doesn’t reflect the reality of people who are calling,” said Romig, a senior adviser at the agency during the Biden administration, which also included the average speed of answer on Social Security’s performance site.

By contrast, the average hold time was 22 minutes last month, while the average time to receive a call back was 59 minutes, the agency told CNN. That’s down from an average of 77 minutes and more than two hours, respectively, in April, the month before Bisignano took office.

The average speed of answer was 7.5 minutes in July, compared to longer than 16 minutes three months earlier.

Last week, CNN called the 800 number more than a half dozen times over several days. The stated hold time just after the service opened at 8am was only 3 minutes, but ranged from 40 minutes to 90 minutes at other times of the day.

To be sure, Social Security has had a busy stretch. A law passed by Congress late last year increased Social Security benefits for nearly 3 million public sector workers, and an agencywide overhaul pushed by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency sparked concern among many of the program’s roughly 74 million beneficiaries. Both developments led to more people flooding the phone lines.

However, it’s now harder for callers – and advocates – to measure Social Security’s customer service. The agency no longer provides real-time information on wait times on its website. Bisignano removed that data, along with other customer service metrics from the site, within weeks of taking office. He later told a House panel that he didn’t want to discourage people from calling.

Last week, Social Security revamped the page, posting more performance metrics, but not the hold or callback times.

The lack of clarity surrounding the agency’s phone metrics was evident in data it posted on the site before the recent update. It showed that the average speed of answer, excluding callback wait time, was 18.5 minutes for the fiscal year to date. But just below that, a chart showed that fewer than half of calls were answered within two hours. (The federal fiscal year starts October 1.)

Bisignano’s claims of swiftly improved service has caught the attention of Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who met with the commissioner last month to discuss the accuracy and public posting of the data. A survey conducted by her office in June found that the average wait time was 102 minutes. Many calls were disconnected while the staffer was waiting on hold.

Warren last month asked the agency’s inspector general to look into the telephone and in-person wait times, as well as other key metrics.

Unable to get through

Scotty Davis of Bangor, Maine, knows firsthand how frustrating it can be to reach Social Security over the telephone. He filed online for retirement benefits in April, asking to have his payments start in September, just after he reached his full retirement age. But he grew concerned when his application had not been approved by late July.

Davis, 66, tried calling the agency at least half a dozen times, spending roughly 6 hours on the phone trying to set up an appointment since the agency’s website said an appointment was required. He waited on hold four times for at least 30 minutes – and twice for much longer than that – but eventually hung up. The one time he asked for a callback, it never came.

“I have a life other than trying to get through to stupid Social Security,” he said. “So I just gave up.”

He then decided to go to his local field office one morning in August, only to find it was overrun – “like trying to get into a Rolling Stones concert,” he said.

Davis went back the next day at 7 am and was the first customer seen when the doors opened at 9 am. Within five minutes, the field office worker fixed the issue, and his application was listed as approved the next time he checked online.

“I contributed for 52 years,” said Davis. “I’m going to get my benefits even if it requires my sitting on a hard marble floor for two hours.”

Longstanding problem

Social Security has long faced complaints about the customer service over its national 800 number, which receives tens of millions of calls annually. Even the agency’s acting commissioner acknowledged at an operational meeting earlier this year that “we suck on the telephone.”

Bisignano, who ran a major payments processing firm before taking the helm of Social Security, promised to quickly improve the beleaguered agency’s phone operations. Among his priorities are utilizing more technology, including artificial intelligence, to field queries and encouraging more Americans to use Social Security’s online site.

But one of his first moves involved beefing up the toll-free number’s workforce, increasing its staffing by 25% by shifting field office workers to the phone lines. That sparked a “dramatic improvement in wait times” in July, when the phone service assisted more than 400,000 additional customers the previous month, the agency told CNN.

Still, the extra staff hasn’t been enough to help all the callers, especially at a time when Social Security is at decades-low staffing levels and when more people are hitting retirement age, said Jessica LaPointe, president of the American Federation of Government Employees’ Council 220, which represents 25,000 employees in field offices and teleservice centers.

“You’re not going to get to all of the calls timely,” LaPointe told CNN. “There are too many of them and too few of us.”

Roughly 5,500 staffers, or nearly 10% of the workforce, have left Social Security this year amid the reorganization, leaving it with approximately 52,000 workers, the agency said. The departure figure does not include the roughly 800 employees who have accepted the agency’s deferred resignation offer but are currently still listed on the payroll.

Bisignano’s decision to bolster the call center workforce to try to alleviate long wait times underscores the problems that develop when thousands of employees are pushed out the door, Romig said.

“When it came time to improve service on the phone, the very first tool they reached for was dramatically staffing up,” she said.

However, any improvements in the phone service are unsustainable and have come at a cost, union officials say. The shift has made it more difficult for the remaining employees at the already strapped field offices to handle their workloads.

A majority of the customer service representatives at the 36 field offices in New York City, Long Island and Westchester that Edwin Osorio represents as president of AFGE Local 3369 are now answering calls to the 800 number. That means the claims specialists in those offices, who typically focus on processing applications, have to also assist the public with getting Social Security cards, updating their bank information or changing their addresses, among other requests, he said.

“People are not being served,” he said.

The agency said that customer service in the field offices has “remained relatively unchanged for the period in question,” noting that fewer than 5% of field office workers were shifted to the toll-free phone number.

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