Thank you very much for the question.
Going back, I think we've always been a service organization. It's in our parliamentary mandate. It's in the legislation of Parliament. That's what we're constituted...along with a recognition of the fact that now a majority of our revenue comes from clients.
We live in a marketplace, sir. If we're not able to provide good service to client departments, then we will not be able to maintain that service line. We need to focus on client service. The client service strategy was the umbrella to bring this together for the department.
The department has, as I mentioned, with the very diversity of our service lines—some 30 different service lines—a vast regional network. We needed to have a very coherent and strong service strategy that affected the whole department, across all the service lines, with all our undertakings. The service strategy was the way of doing that.
I would say that at the heart of it is setting rigorous service standards, and these, sir, are standards that can be measured. It's just pass-fail—you met it or you didn't—and not those fine words. We now use that to report on the results and then recalibrate.
We did miss some of our standards, but that's the way it's designed to work. That's a warning sign to us that we need to improve, we need to up our game, and that's the way we're driving improvement there.
It has also established that the most important thing between a service provider and a client is the relationship. It's engaging the client, understanding their needs, and the client believing you're doing everything possible to help them meet their business needs. The client service strategy is built around that.
We are a leader in this kind of strategy for a department of our type. I would give recognition to Service Canada as being the first entity in the government that obviously had service delivery to citizens at their centre, but many departments have service strategies relevant to their mandate.