Thank you very much for the question.
I'll simply say that we have outsourced this service since approximately 1998, which means that we have almost 23 years plus of a contracted service. That means that both the resources and the knowledge and the ability to bring that back in-house and deliver that support to members do not exist.
Furthermore, what I would indicate to you is that perhaps it's a bit of a myth to think that we could deliver the same scale of services that we currently receive from that company. I'll explain it this way. Currently, that company operates extended hours for us to cover off both coasts of Canada as well as the fact that we have members who need services OUTCAN. It offers an email response within a certain period of time. It will respond and process transactions over the weekend.
For our military members, while I realize we use the phrase that we are “24/7/365”, that does not translate—particularly given our current personnel shortages—to our being able to provide that same service wherein a member could expect that they could walk in at seven in the morning and see someone to ask their questions to, or whether they could send an email in the evening and expect within a period of time to get a reply or that they would have transactions processed over the weekend. That's simply not feasible.
We are retendering the contract with the understanding that there need to be improvements to it, but we're also looking internally at how we can better bridge the understanding of our members to the benefits and perhaps better enable them to be able to have that dialogue with the service provider about what their benefits are, and also, then, speaking specifically, can we leverage generative AI as a tool to be able to provide sort of benefits adviser to say to you, “Okay, here's what you should ask of BGRS specifically.” There's an aspect of this that also goes back onto the members to understand what are their benefits and what they are intending to do so that BGRS can provide them their correct service.
Thank you for the question.