Human Resources Committee on June 6th, 2019

[Sylvain Ricard]

I'm afraid I'll have to say I agree with you. Service standards should have been in place for some time, I suppose. We perform an audit for a period of time, so I can't tell you if there were some before and whether they were removed or dropped. At the time of the audit, there were no service standards, as I mentioned, except as I just described a few minutes ago.

[Dan Ruimy, Liberal, Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge, BC]

Okay. It's a little frustrating because generally you compare where we were and where we are today. In order to get to where we want to go tomorrow, again, you have to be able to measure where you are. I'm just surprised that we don't have that.

I want to move to the digital aspect. I know that our government has been trying to digitize a lot of the services. Has any of that played into your report?

[Sylvain Ricard]

I guess it plays into our referring to the fact that there is a strategy at TBS about what I'll call online services generally. As part of that strategy, call centres were not considered. As we note in the report, and I referred to this in the opening statement, 25% of Canadians want to use, or in certain cases such as I described in the opening statement—disabilities and all of those reasons—don't want.... It's not that they want to use, but they have to use the phone.

We recommended to Treasury Board to include in their strategy the call centres, and they accepted that and are going to do it.

[Dan Ruimy, Liberal, Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge, BC]

Okay. You also mentioned that eight call centres have been upgraded. Have you been able to determine whether there has been a marked improvement from those specific eight call centres, or have we not looked at that?

[Sylvain Ricard]

The upgrades—those eight—were not up and running at the time of our audit, except for maybe one. I'll refer to Mr. Goulet the question whether there was one. The improvement, if any, would have occurred after the period of the audit, so I'm afraid I can't answer that question about its impact and improvements due to it.

[Dan Ruimy, Liberal, Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge, BC]

From what you've seen of those upgrades, would you feel that moving down the line they would produce better results?

[Sylvain Ricard]

Well, it's difficult for us. Auditors like to speak based on facts. All I can say is that based on the action plans that were presented to us there should be improvements, but you will only see improvements once the plans are fully implemented and monitored. Until then, you won't know.

[Dan Ruimy, Liberal, Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge, BC]

What time frame was this report based on?

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Be very brief, please.

[Dan Ruimy, Liberal, Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge, BC]

When was the report started and when was it ended?

[Jean Goulet, Principal, Performance Audit, Audit Operations, Office of the Auditor General]

The scope of the audit was fiscal year 2017-18.

[Dan Ruimy, Liberal, Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge, BC]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Monsieur Dusseault, take six minutes, please.

[Pierre-Luc Dusseault, NDP, Sherbrooke, QC]

Mr. Chair, thank you for welcoming to your committee.

I'm very interested in the topic, since we're talking about services to Canadians. When it comes to service quality, the Government of Canada can't be said to be performing well, not just compared to other governments, but also compared to the private sector, where no one would accept poor service from a company to its customers.

Canadians pay taxes to the government every year and expect that this money will be used to serve them well and in a timely manner. Clearly, this isn't the case with the call centres you looked at, and I remember that it was the Canada Revenue Agency that was severely blamed in 2017. It seems that all these government agencies are fighting each other to get the worst customer service record.

In your audits, did you find out if your 2017 report on the Canada Revenue Agency had any feedback from departments and if they were aware of the issues? Do you think these organizations have tried to solve these problems or simply ignored them since 2017?

[Sylvain Ricard]

Since this isn't an issue we addressed during our audits, it's difficult for me to tell you whether these organizations were aware of the problems or ignored them. Again, you may want to contact the departments directly to ask them if they are aware of the situation and if this has influenced their approach to call centres.

[Pierre-Luc Dusseault, NDP, Sherbrooke, QC]

My colleague just raised the whole issue of technology modernization. In its response to your report, the Canada Revenue Agency was clearly committed to modernizing its systems to respond adequately to the public.

I'm wondering what happens when calls are rejected, when people are redirected to other telephone options or when they are simply asked to call back later. How is this accounted for in performance measures? What worries me about the numbers I'm seeing are the average wait times, including eight minutes for employment insurance, five minutes for the Canada pension plan and old age security, 32 minutes for Immigration and five minutes for Veterans Affairs. However, these statistics don't include calls where communication is cut off and people haven't been able to speak to an agent. Does that distort the data a little? If communication is cut off in 45% to 50% of calls and people can't talk to an agent, but agents answer the other half of the calls in eight minutes, do you find these statistics reliable?

[Sylvain Ricard]

We highlight this situation in one or two of the tables in our report. To take the example of employment insurance, the government received 8.9 million calls. Of that number, 3.6 million failed to establish contact with an agent, and 690,000 people hung up. The remaining calls were from people who were able to talk to an agent and, unless I'm mistaken, the wait time for those calls is counted.

[Jean Goulet]

Indeed, it's for the calls that reached an agent.

The department verifies that 80% of calls reached an agent in the eight minutes set. Although the department tracks redirected and blocked calls, or calls where the caller hangs up while on hold, that data isn't disclosed publicly.

[Pierre-Luc Dusseault, NDP, Sherbrooke, QC]

This calculation method removes their importance from service standards. If, for instance, the standard is 10 minutes, but that time limit is only met for 25% of calls that have not been redirected, cut or abandoned, the service hasn't improved in my opinion. So it isn't enough to establish service standards for time limits; the service also has to be accessible.

[Sylvain Ricard]

That's what our report explains. It's important not only to have service standards and to measure performance, but it's also important to be transparent and provide all the information. The table I mentioned earlier shows that 50% of calls don't reach an agent. It's important, since it shows that the eight minute time limit applies only to calls answered by an agent.

[Pierre-Luc Dusseault, NDP, Sherbrooke, QC]

I would like to ask one question in the time I have left.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

You have 35 seconds.

[Pierre-Luc Dusseault, NDP, Sherbrooke, QC]

I would like to come back to the argument made by Employment and Social Development Canada to give it the benefit of the doubt, namely that self-serve functions are offered by the department 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

How are calls from people who use these self-service functions counted? These people may eventually get their questions answered, receive the service they are looking for and become satisfied clients. These calls aren't rejected or forwarded to an agent. Are they counted in any particular way?

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Very briefly, please.

[Jean Goulet]

Based on this, we focused on calls where the person wanted to talk to an agent and did not want to use the department's automated system or other options.

That being said, we did take a quick look at the automated system, but unfortunately the department does not keep sufficiently reliable data about it for us to include it in our audit.