Human Resources Committee on June 6th, 2019

[Sylvain Ricard]

No. Again, due to the fact that we have to scope our audit to a certain size, at some point we have to make some choices. This is not something we've included.

Going in, we expected that there would be service standards to manage the call centres, given the requirements from the TB policy.

[Kerry Diotte, Conservative, Edmonton Griesbach, AB]

Right now, can you explain the lack of service? Are there no service standards per se, no benchmarks? Is it just left up—?

[Sylvain Ricard]

TB policy requires service standards in three areas. In two of the three areas there were no service standards at all, and in one of the areas there was one entity that had no service standards in place.

For us, the importance here is that management turned to Canadians.... I mentioned earlier that 25% of Canadians, all for good reasons, need a phone system to reach out to government. You thus need to have well-functioning call centres in place; otherwise, those Canadians don't have access to government services.

[Kerry Diotte, Conservative, Edmonton Griesbach, AB]

I've seen this myself, and it's frustrating: no matter what retailer or government you're dealing with, often they'll try to push you to the website. I've had an instance when trying to get my cable fixed. They say, well, you could do this by going online. No, my cable is down.

Is there a push in government, from what you've seen here, to push people to a website when they actually want to be served by phone, and in many cases need to be because of certain impairments and so forth?

[Sylvain Ricard]

I'm going to be careful with this one, because I wouldn't want to talk specifically for the CIO who was at the public accounts committee hearing some days ago, who conducted a poll on that question. Maybe Mr. Goulet can help make sure that I don't go wrong here, but the best people to answer that question would be the CIO and Treasury Board.

They're working on—my words here—a multi-channel system. We refer in the report to the fact that there are various options when people call in. They can be referred to the website or referred to the automated system, but it remains the case that some Canadians can't operate like that; their needs are not fulfilled by those channels.

[Kerry Diotte, Conservative, Edmonton Griesbach, AB]

My hunch is that there are call centres out there that do a better job. Is government behind the private sector, for instance?

Let me put it this way. Do you think there are private sector or other levels of government that do a better job, that might be the gold standard?

[Jean Goulet]

For the purposes of this audit we didn't really look at the standards of the private sector. We wanted to use a benchmark that was as close as possible to what happens in general when Canadians want to speak to the government. That's why we went to that survey, which basically said that Canadians are willing to wait up to seven minutes.

[Sylvain Ricard]

I'm going to offer as well that if you don't have service standards in place and you don't measure your performance, you can't compare.

[Kerry Diotte, Conservative, Edmonton Griesbach, AB]

Right now an employee is sitting there, and if they're lucky, callers will get a live person. The employees don't have any standard. They don't know how long they're supposed to spend on a call, etc.

Don't most industries say you should spend five minutes on one customer and move on to the next? That's just one level of service standard.

[Jean Goulet]

We didn't look at the amount of time an agent should be spending with a caller. We only looked at whether the callers were getting access and whether the information that was being provided to them was provided in a timely manner, as per the standards. We also didn't look at whether the calls were answered accurately, although the departments have quality controls in place to deal with that question. We didn't audit that part.

[Kerry Diotte, Conservative, Edmonton Griesbach, AB]

Thanks.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

MP Ruimy, please.

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

Thank you again for staying.

I'm an operations guy. I've been in the restaurant world all my life and I've worked a lot with service standards and service times.

There are a couple things. We have to be careful, because government is not private. When you call a private call centre, it's to order something, it's to lodge a complaint, it's for a whole bunch of different reasons. When you're calling somebody about immigration, however, the standard for how long you're going to sit on that phone is going to be quite different from everybody else's.

My first question is, did you take into consideration the time spent...? There were four call centres, and they were all different. Did we look at what type of call centre it was? For immigration, was there a longer time that they were on the phone actually talking to the representative?

[Jean Goulet]

As I mentioned earlier, what we were interested in was the three specific standards—whether the callers were getting access to the agent, whether they were getting timely responses, and whether they were getting accurate responses. We didn't look at how long an agent would be talking to a caller in order to deal with the issue.

As I mentioned earlier on, by way of comparison we looked at the survey that basically says Canadians are willing to wait seven minutes to get to a caller, but we didn't audit anything after an agent answers a caller.

[Sylvain Ricard]

If I may offer one additional piece just for clarity, I would say that it's not for us to establish the standard. We're not judging the standard. We're auditing against all the policy requirements and we're drawing the picture.

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

I agree. We've talked about benchmarks. That's important. I'm trying to get to what this benchmark is going to look like in the future. You mentioned dropped calls, for instance. How did you determine dropped calls? What's the definition of a dropped call?

[Jean Goulet]

In this case, these were calls in which the caller wanted to talk to an agent but could not do so for a variety of reasons that we explained earlier on. They were either redirected to the automated service, asked to go to the website or disconnected. These are basically what we call the dropped calls.

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

How did you actually execute this? Was it based on surveys? Was it you sitting in a call centre watching people? What was the methodology?

[Jean Goulet]

We asked to have access to the data of the call centres in order to do that analysis. We also requested the reports that the department had on that type of information. We could talk about the information that was in the report but the data itself was not available, so we couldn't provide any level of assurance as to whether or not what the department was reporting was accurate. We asked for new data to be generated on an ongoing basis during the audit, and, on the basis of that data, we did our own analysis.

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

I'm struggling with this statement by one of the ministers:

Thanks to certain investments, Service Canada agents were able to answer 22% more calls than they did over the last full year under the Harper government, while the number of Canadians who were unable to reach a Service Canada agent fell by nearly 70%.

So each call centre has its own data. Is that correct?

[Jean Goulet]

Yes.

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

They're using that data, so where's the disconnect in their data versus your data?

[Sylvain Ricard]

I'll offer this. First, for our report, through our audit process, we get entities to confirm the accuracy and to confirm that nothing went wrong, because we could have forgotten something or not considered something. That's part of the due diligence we're going through.

Second, you're referring to some numbers. I'm sorry, but I can't speak to those. I don't know what they are. You can look at numbers in all sorts of different ways. You could refer to the number of individuals reaching out to a department to get access, and we do refer to that, to the broader service channels that are offered. Again, we didn't look at those other channels. We focused on the call centres.

So I'm afraid I can't speak specifically to the comparison of those numbers. There are all sorts of numbers out there.

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

Okay. I have only a little time. When you came to the final numbers of missed calls and so on and so forth, were those based on the four call centres, or on a projection that shows that if all call centres were operating like this, this is what that number would look like? Is that a statistical number?

[Jean Goulet]

Those are the numbers that were reported by the department, so they are their actual numbers. The problem is that we couldn't verify those numbers because the source data was not kept by the department.