Mr. Chair, ladies and gentlemen, good morning.
I appreciate the opportunity to appear today to address ways to improve our services to our veterans.
Our mission at Veterans Affairs is to enable the well-being of our veterans and their families, as well as commemorating the service and the sacrifice of all those who wore the uniform of Canada's armed forces.
As such, we appreciate the attention the Office of the Auditor General has brought to the services that we provide.
The bottom line up front is that the department accepts all of the recommendations and will develop a comprehensive action plan to implement all of the recommendations as soon as contracting and technology will allow. We appreciate how important it is for veterans to be able to communicate with the department in the ways and means they choose. We provide a broad range of options. They may choose a toll-free telephone service access through our website, through web-based My VAC Account secure messaging, over social media or by visiting in person any one of our 38 offices across the country.
lt is gratifying to see the number of veterans, both young and more experienced, connecting with the department through the online services offered on 'My VAC Account'. Through it, veterans can apply online for benefits and services, upload documents to complete their applications, track the status of their applications, view summaries of their benefits, and connect directly and securely with staff.
My VAC Account, which is our online web service, provided service for over 91,000 veteran users as of this past April, including serving members and veterans of the Canadian Armed Forces, veterans of the Royal Canadian Mountain Police and all of their family members. Monthly traffic is about 160,000 log-ins and continues to grow month over month.
Still, our national contact service network remains an important means for many of our veteran clients to communicate with the department. Our latest results show that 79% of calls are answered by an agent and that the average wait time for our clients is about five minutes. Clearly there is room for improvement, and we are committed to doing so.
Turning to service standards, it should be noted that the department regularly reviews our objectives to understand what we're doing right, and where we need to improve. Our 2017 External Service Standard Review found that our service standards were appropriate. Therefore the tasks at hand are to up our game, focus on improving processes, and reduce turnaround times.
We agree with the recommendations on service standards in the Auditor General's report and will seek veteran feedback when planning any future changes to service standards. In the near term, we are pursuing an approach to employ post-phone call survey responses to measure veteran satisfaction.
The Auditor General's report found that we did not always consider the needs of our veteran clients when making decisions about call centre services. One specific example is with respect to teletype service. When the department stopped offering a teletypewriter service for the hearing disabled, there was no indication from our records as to the rationale for this cut in service, nor whether there was consultation with veterans. This is not appropriate service.
As such, we are reversing the decision to ensure that all veterans, regardless of their injuries, can access our call services. We are also committed to ensuring that veterans with hearing difficulties can communicate with the national contact centre network.
With this goal in mind, we are extending our teletypewriter services that are currently in place for the veterans who are in crisis but with hearing difficulties to all the types of the calls handled by our call centre. We have identified a teletypewriter solution that seamlessly integrates with our current suite of equipment and will implement it in partnership with Shared Services Canada by the end of March 2020 or sooner, if at all possible.
Going forward, we also commit to considering the input of those we serve when making any plans that will affect veterans.
Members of the committee, Veterans Affairs Canada's mission is to support the well-being of our veterans. We are committed to improving our performance to be veteran-centric and strive for service excellence.
I thank the Office of the Auditor General for so clearly showing us how we could better serve our veterans and their families. Veterans Affairs Canada has already embarked on addressing all the recommendations in the report.
Thank you very much.