Human Resources Committee on June 6th, 2019

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Thank you.

MP Hogg, please.

[Gordie Hogg, Liberal, South Surrey—White Rock, BC]

My riding is South Surrey—White Rock. I have to say that at any HUMA meeting.

[John Barlow, Conservative, Foothills, AB]

Who's your staff?

[Gordie Hogg, Liberal, South Surrey—White Rock, BC]

Yes, my staff, I would like to....

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

It's not a farewell speech, Gordie. Come on.

[Gordie Hogg, Liberal, South Surrey—White Rock, BC]

Okay. Thank you.

How did you determine the eight call centres you wanted to look at? Can we assume they are statistically significant in the range of the 221 that are out there?

[Sylvain Ricard]

I'll ask Monsieur Goulet to expand on that. I just want to make one small clarification. We didn't look at the eight. We looked at the four we have in the exhibit in the report. The eight refers to the fact that there are 221 in total; eight were modernized, or are being modernized. On the 213, they will have to...plan to modernize them.

[Gordie Hogg, Liberal, South Surrey—White Rock, BC]

So you only looked at four.

[Sylvain Ricard]

We looked at the four that are listed here in the report.

[Gordie Hogg, Liberal, South Surrey—White Rock, BC]

How were they selected?

[Jean Goulet]

I'll ask Ms. Murphy to add to this, but basically we were looking at the possibility of studying call centres of different tenures: some that are significantly large, others that are medium-sized, and smaller sized as well. We also had to consider our own capacity.

It's not a sampled representation, but it is one that emulates, if you will, whatever is out there in terms of call centres.

[Sylvain Ricard]

Basically, what we're trying to do here.... As I referred to earlier, any audit we do, we're trying to make a difference for Canadians. When we turned to the 221—some of them are internal to government, some of them are for Canadians—we established that those four would be very relevant ones to select. We have to draw the line somewhere. We can't do all of them.

[Gordie Hogg, Liberal, South Surrey—White Rock, BC]

You noted that none of the four you looked at had done any audits or had any service standards in place. Is that correct?

[Sylvain Ricard]

Well, I mentioned briefly that there are three areas where the Treasury Board policy asked to have service standards. For two of the three areas, none of the four had a service standard. For the third area, one of the four did not have a service standard.

[Gordie Hogg, Liberal, South Surrey—White Rock, BC]

I note you also said that without service standards, callers cannot know what level of service they can expect from call centres. I think people do have a sense of what to expect, and they reflect that, I think, to all of us quite accurately and appropriately. The media does have standards. If we're going to look at developing things, obviously we should be going to the recipients of those people who are making the calls, the ones who will be impacted by the policies. Do you have call standards at the Auditor General's? When people call in, what would your standards be? Would they be typical, gold standard or...?

[Sylvain Ricard]

We're not a call centre.

[Gordie Hogg, Liberal, South Surrey—White Rock, BC]

You do receive calls.

[Sylvain Ricard]

We do receive calls but I'll say it's very limited in terms of the number of calls from Canadians for a request. We get requests from Canadians through various means, from IDs to sub-topics to audits. I'm going to risk saying that when you call our office, in the vast majority of cases you are going to be answered either right away or within a minute.

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

What's the phone number?

[Gordie Hogg, Liberal, South Surrey—White Rock, BC]

He's just dialling it. In my office, and I think in most of our offices, we have a mission statement or a statement of standards that we expect from our staff in terms of carrying them out. I think most MPs probably have something like that. Is there something you've learned from your experiences that you would look at in terms of what those standards might be? If we wanted to give the call centres something to start with, this is sort of what we want. I'm assuming that within the culture of what's going on, a lot of the staff are frustrated too. I think they are feeling overwhelmed and frustrated with that, so it's also about the culture of what people are dealing with within the call centres. Is there anywhere in the world that actually has a gold standard in terms of these operational standards that could be put in place? Is there a model that makes those principles or values operational and shows us how we are going to check?

[Sylvain Ricard]

I will ask Mr. Goulet to add to this if he feels the need to but I'll start with this. Good practices exist. We have not done any benchmarking on this audit. Again referring to a comment I made earlier, we have to make choices as to how we scope the audit, given the capacity we have. We also try to maximize the value we bring. We have not done benchmarking to compare. The questions that were important for us were: Is there a service standard? Has management established a service standard based on consulting with Canadians? We do mention in the report that on average, Canadians, based on the survey, expect to speak to someone within seven minutes. I'm offering that although I'm not sure that's answering your question.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

You have 20 seconds.

[Jean Goulet]

If I can add to this, what Monsieur Ricard just alluded to is a survey done by the Institute for Citizen-Centred Service, which is a non-profit intergovernmental organization. It's not as if we went to service standards that are being applied by private organizations or private call centres. We're looking at it from a Canadian's perspective with regard to their expectations of government.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Thank you.

MP Falk, you have five minutes, please.

[Rosemarie Falk, Conservative, Battlefords—Lloydminster, SK]

Thank you all for being here today.

I want to follow up on what Mr. Hogg was saying. Was this the first audit done on call centres?