Citizenship and Immigration Committee on Dec. 8th, 2016

[The Chair, Liberal, Borys Wrzesnewskyj]

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2) and the motion adopted by the committee on October 4, the committee will begin its study on the modernization of client service delivery.

We have officials from the department before us today once again: Mr. Robert Orr, assistant deputy minister; Paul Armstrong, director general, centralized network; and Michelle Lattimore, associate director general. I note that we have Mr. Fraser Valentine with us as well.

Mr. Orr, the floor is yours.

[Robert Orr, Assistant Deputy Minister, Operations, Department of Citizenship and Immigration]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, for this opportunity to address this committee.

I can say right from the start that the subject of this study is something that Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada takes very seriously. Indeed, it is one where the minister is determined to make considerable headway.

Over the last number of years, the department has made significant strides in laying the groundwork for a modernized client experience that maintains the integrity of our immigration system.

To this end, we have implemented a global case management system for almost all of our major lines of business. Building on this system capacity, we've improved the flexibility of our processing network. We can now shift less complex client applications from temporarily overloaded offices to those with the available capacity to help out. Among other things, this approach has helped us deal with an enormous increase of more than 40% in applications for temporary residence over the past few years.

We have also put in place across the world a visa application centre network—132 centres in 94 countries—to support those clients who want personalized help in filling out their forms. As an example of the results, today a client in Beijing who wants to visit Canada can go to a local visa application centre and get help in Mandarin, have their information sent electronically to the operations support centre in Ottawa overnight for uploading into the global case management system, and then have their file ready for a decision-maker back in Beijing by the time the visa office opens for business the next day.

At the same time, today a client who needs an electronic travel authorization to come to Canada can quickly apply from their smart phone and, for the vast majority of applicants, get a decision right back to their phone within three minutes.

These types of client interactions are possible because of our sustained focus on and investment in a modernized processing infrastructure that supports our ability to be vigilant with respect to the integrity of our programs, which is in fact the foundation of good client service.

We recognize that while we've made significant progress in certain lines of business, there remain considerable opportunities for further improvement. IRCC offers clients over 75 services, but while temporary and economic permanent resident clients can apply online, not all of our clients currently have access to these service delivery channels, and we don't have processing times down to where we want them to be. Further rollout of online applications and reduction of processing times remain a key priority for us.

But we also know that the client experience is not just about online applications and reduced processing times. And so we are committed to listening to and learning from the clients who use our services. We do this in a number of different ways.

For example, we conduct a client satisfaction survey every two years, which gives us information about what clients like and what they want more of. In our last survey, clients told us that overall 85% of them were satisfied with their immigration and citizenship experience. But they also told us that they would like to get more information about their case status.

We also have a client service feedback web form online, and receive approximately 150 emails a week from people telling us about their service experience. These messages not only help to give us instant feedback when things aren't working, but also have helped us to identify parts of our instructions which are not clear.

We are trying new methods of gathering client insights as well. For example, this year the department experimented with using human-centred design techniques to better understand the client experience. We went out and talked directly to clients, NGOs, immigration consultants, academics, and others to better understand the whole experience from the client's perspective. This initiative was hugely worthwhile and has helped us to refocus much of our work on client service.

All of this information from surveys, direct client feedback, and design challenges has led us to establish three new client experience priorities for the department: first, innovating our processes so that they make better sense to clients; second, finding new ways to provide clients greater assurance that their cases are moving forward; and third, making sure that we are listening when clients need to talk to us.

While our work in gathering client insights remains important and continues, we've already launched a number of initiatives in these three areas. For example, just yesterday our minister announced changes to the processing of family class applications, which will go a long way in improving the ease of the process for those clients. We're also making improvements to how easy it is to upload documents and pay fees online.

To provide clients with greater assurance as to the status of their applications, IRCC rolled out “link my application” functionality earlier this year. It's an online tool that lets many clients who submitted paper applications get access to the same online account information as those who applied electronically.

We'll also be adding more case status information into the online account to give clients who are waiting more frequent and meaningful updates. In addition, we're also looking at new ways to reduce the amount of time it takes to let clients know we've received their application, and we will be experimenting with sending text messages to clients when their applications reach our mailroom. This will help to close the gap that exists for clients between mailing an application and getting an official acknowledgement of receipt letter.

Listening to clients and building trust is also a priority. We have piloted a new approach at the IRCC national call centre, enabling agents to provide clients with detailed case information even if regular processing times have not elapsed. We also log all calls right in the case management system so that if a client calls back we know right away what their concern was the last time and can follow up as necessary.

While this approach is taking more time upfront, it is significantly reducing same day repeat callers, and demonstrating that an upfront investment can reduce client anxiety without necessarily reducing productivity. In other words, good client service also adds business value.

Mr. Chair, I can assure this committee once again that innovating and improving service is at the very top of IRCC's agenda. Through incremental innovation and risk-based analysis, IRCC can achieve service excellence and meet client needs while continuing to uphold confidence in the integrity of the immigration, settlement, citizenship, and passport programs.

Thank you for the invitation to be here today.

[The Chair, Liberal, Borys Wrzesnewskyj]

Thank you, Mr. Orr.

Mr. Sarai, please, for seven minutes.

[Randeep Sarai, Liberal, Surrey Centre, BC]

Good afternoon, Mr. Orr. I thank you and the rest of your team for joining us today and for your presentation before the committee.

One of the surprises that I and many of my colleagues around this table shared when we were elected as members of Parliament is that we also had to become experts in immigration, and our offices became the front line. Can you share with us what initiatives, if any, you have initiated over the past 10 years to help remedy some of the customer service issues that we hear about on an almost daily basis?

[Robert Orr]

Mr. Chair, there's a whole variety of different initiatives that have already been undertaken, and a large number of them are continuing. We realize that client service has to be multi-faceted and that our strategy to attack client service has to be multi-faceted, not only in the clarity of the information that is provided up front, but also very much in giving assurance to our clients that their cases are moving and so on. It's within those parameters, which I've already outlined, that we've done a number of things.

First of all, there is the centralized intake of applications, which is a fairer process. All applications are coming into one area. We've increased our use of risk triage. What this essentially means is that we are distinguishing between those cases that are complex or non-complex and are trying to get the non-complex cases through as quickly as we can so that we can focus our efforts and time on the more complex cases. We get the straightforward cases out of the system as fast as we can, which is better client service for everyone and so on.

A number of other different things have gone on to provide better service to our clients. I could mention the open work permits for spousal cases; the intake cap for parents and grandparents, which has gone up; and the ministerial instructions, which have helped us control the intake of applications and how we manage those applications in a wide variety of areas.

Some of the things we're doing right now are very important. I think the work at the call centre is critically important, and we've made major efforts in that area since the summer. We are doing more and more to allow people to get information electronically about the status of their application so that they're aware of what's happening on that side of things. We are ending upfront medicals. We will require medicals only at the time when we're actually able to progress with the application. Also, more and more applications are online, and that includes all our temporary lines of business. Of course, express entry is entirely online. Likewise, eTA is all online.

All of this is moving in the right direction. There is a lot more to be done; we have no qualms about that. On the other hand, I think very major progress has been made in a variety of different areas.

[Randeep Sarai, Liberal, Surrey Centre, BC]

I want to also explore the idea of service standards. I know that governments, federal and a number of provincial ones, have this in place when providing services to Canadians. What sort of service standards does IRCC currently have in place, and can you inform me and my colleagues on what happens when service standards are not met?

[Robert Orr]

We have a very robust list of service standards and a very long list of them for the various lines of business. For some we do not have service standards for a variety of reasons, but for the vast majority we do have them. We take those very seriously indeed. Overall we are meeting those service standards. We report on that on a regular basis. It's available on our website, how we're doing, and we also report to Treasury Board on our service standards.

We take these very seriously. We try to meet them whenever we can. If we're not meeting them, I can assure you that we are very prudent and very conscious of that. We make real efforts to understand both why we're not able to meet those service standards and what we can do to improve the situation.

[Randeep Sarai, Liberal, Surrey Centre, BC]

Can you inform this committee on what kind of feedback the department receives from new Canadians, immigrants and refugees, about their programs and the accessibility for folks who are trying to find out information about their applications?

[Robert Orr]

Perhaps I can start off, and my colleague Ms. Lattimore might be able to carry on with some of this.

We get information in a variety of ways. One of them is the survey we do every two years. That shows an 85% satisfaction rate, which is reasonably good news but by no means grounds for complacency. We also get an awful lot of information back through emails on a regular basis. On a weekly basis, as mentioned, we get about 150 emails, which bring issues to our attention—we can talk about that—and that's helpful to us.

Perhaps Ms. Lattimore could explain that a little bit more. It's particularly valuable at the call centre, for which she is responsible.

[Michelle Lattimore, Associate Director General, Centralized Network, Department of Citizenship and Immigration]

Thank you.

It's true that we collect information from our clients in a variety of ways. We're certainly looking to expand more in that direction, because we know that at the end of the day the clients are the real source of insight for us into where we need to be investing. We do know that clients become frustrated with us. They send us web forms, and we received about 5,000 complaints last year. We act on those. We have a group of analysts who look at that information and feed it back throughout the department so that we can ensure there's an ongoing feedback loop that helps us to inform programs moving forward.

We also collect a significant amount of data at the call centre. We look at our top complaints. We understand what people are calling us about. Generally speaking, about 50% of the calls we get at our call centre are about case status. That's really given us an indication that we need to do more work to get people case status information as quickly as we can.

[Randeep Sarai, Liberal, Surrey Centre, BC]

That's a lot of what we get as well, case status updates.

I'd like to talk about the IRCC website. The website is accessible in that its help is available in many different languages. There's also a lot of information available to prospective Canadians who want to make Canada their home. That said, I want to explore another side of accessibility, and that's navigating the website, ensuring that the information people are looking for is clear. I'm wondering if this is something you're looking into exploring and implementing, and also, if there's a complaint that you've heard in the past about the website, if there's a way to make it more user-friendly.

[Robert Orr]

The website is something that we're very conscious we really need to address. We're doing an awful lot of work on that. It's an evergreen thing. We revisited and then redid the website a couple of years ago. That was a major step in the right direction, but it's time we looked at it. We continue to do that. We also did a few things. We launched the “come to Canada” wizard and an online help centre, which has been useful. We implemented the Google search capability, which has been helpful. We launched an interactive “pay your fees” tool. We also launched a processing times calculator, which has been valuable.

There have been some very positive things on that site. We also are conscious, though, that certain parts of the website are hit more than others. We're really focusing our efforts on those areas that we know are hit the most so that we get the most bang for our media buck.

[The Chair, Liberal, Borys Wrzesnewskyj]

Thank you, Mr. Orr.

Mr. Saroya, for seven minutes, please.

[Bob Saroya, Conservative, Markham—Unionville, ON]

Thank you to all the officials for coming in and giving us the lowdown.

My first question, for Mr. Orr or anybody else, is with regard to the passport. Passport Canada’s information systems are being integrated into the global case management system. This follows the 2013 shift in responsibility for passports to what was then the Department of Citizenship and Immigration. A recent internal audit of the integration process found that, among other things, planning for security requirements was inadequate. Could you please give the committee an update on actions taken to fix the system and on when you expect the passport program to be fully integrated into the GCMS?

[Robert Orr]

Indeed, Mr. Chair, that is absolutely correct. What was Passport Canada at the time became the passport program of IRCC in July 2013. One of the reasons for that was to modernize the program and to make the passport program more accessible to Canadians and so on.

In general, the success of the passport program is quite remarkable. We are meeting service standards well over 99% of the time, and the satisfaction rate with the passport program from Canadians is at over 96%. There are very strong and positive views of how the passport program is operating at the moment.

We do need to make changes to ensure that the program is modernized, that it stays up to date and so on. Indeed, one of the things we want to do is to migrate the computer system from the existing IRIS system into GCMS. We're doing that very deliberately and slowly. It's a major business transformation piece, and thus we want to do it very prudently.

I cannot give you an exact date for when that is going to happen, because we do want to be very cautious on how we do it, but there is very active work going on within IRCC and with our service department, Service Canada, which actually delivers the passport program at the moment, to ensure that service to Canadians is not impacted negatively in any way.

[Bob Saroya, Conservative, Markham—Unionville, ON]

Thank you.

In 2015, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada launched a survey to measure the impact of program modernization on client satisfaction. How many people participated in this survey? Were participants Canadians or foreign nationals? Can you share the highlights of the survey with the committee? Also, have any measures been taken to respond to the results of the survey? Last, does IRCC plan to do more surveys on the same topic?

[Michelle Lattimore]

The client satisfaction survey is done every two years. We started in 2013. For us, 2015 was the first opportunity we had to really look back and compare performance over previous years.

In 2015, 85% of our clients reported being very satisfied with our service. That was down 1% from 2013; however, there was a notable increase in satisfaction for those who were granted citizenship, likely thanks to processing times, which had sped up considerably for these clients.

The satisfaction survey results are based on responses from about 3,700 applicants. These are applicants who have completed the service with the department. It's a response rate of about 11%, so it's still low, but certainly within expectations. There is a margin of error of only about 1%.

One of the important pieces that we implemented based on feedback from the 2015 survey is actually the processing times calculator that ADM Orr referred to recently. Clients told us in the 2015 survey that they were very frustrated that they couldn't get accurate information about processing times online. We were able to implement changes to that just at the end of last year, actually, and we have seen quite favourable results from clients as a result.

[Bob Saroya, Conservative, Markham—Unionville, ON]

Were the 15% of customers dissatisfied basically because it was taking too long? I see that 85% were satisfied. Mr. Orr's statement says “85% of them were satisfied with their immigration and citizenship experience. But they also told us that they would like to get more information about their case status.”

Their dissatisfaction was really with the length of time...?

[Michelle Lattimore]

It's interesting. We tend to make an assumption sometimes that it is the processing time that is the highest irritant for clients. What we've found through other outreach avenues with clients is that in fact that tends to fall in the bottom half of what really upsets people. What we understand from clients, having spoken to them—and especially following the work that we did with our family class design challenge this year—is, as Mr. Orr mentioned, that the inability to access case status information is an irritant. Also, having to work through processes that don't seem intuitive and that don't seem to make sense to them is an irritant to the clients. They also feel that they need to be heard by us, that they need to be heard when things go off the rails. They don't always feel heard.

[Bob Saroya, Conservative, Markham—Unionville, ON]

The target for economic immigrants in the 2017 immigration level plan is 73,700, a significantly higher number than the number of foreign nationals who arrived through express entry in the first year of this operation. There were 9,740 individuals, including principal applicants and their families, who came. How many economic immigrants have arrived through express entry in its second year? Has the department been able to maintain the service standard of processing 80% of express entry applications in six months or less?

[The Chair, Liberal, Borys Wrzesnewskyj]

A brief and succinct answer in 20 seconds, please.

[Robert Orr]

It was always intended that the express entry would start off slowly and build. That's what we're seeing.

We had cases that were residual cases from the old program. Increasingly, those are being finished, and they will be finished pretty much entirely by the end of 2016, so we will see entirely from express entry for the federal skilled worker program...and, yes, we are maintaining the six-month processing time.

[The Chair, Liberal, Borys Wrzesnewskyj]

Thank you.

Ms. Kwan, please, for seven minutes.

[Jenny Kwan, NDP, Vancouver East, BC]

Thank you to all the officials.

To follow up with you, Ms. Lattimore, I think you mentioned that last year you received 5,000 complaints. I wonder if you can advise us of what your top three complaints are in those 5,000 complaints.

[Michelle Lattimore]

Of the 5,000 we received, the top complaint that came in through our web form was about processing times, at about 1,100. Then it dropped significantly, with 348—a fairly small number of our clients—about call centre services, and then 239 about our “MyCIC” services online.