Mr. Chair, thank you for inviting me to address this committee once again.
Canada is an increasingly popular destination for people who want to move to or visit this country. Every year, IRCC interacts with millions of clients including applicants for electronic travel authorizations, visas, permanent residents, asylum, citizenship and passports. Over the last five years, we've seen a significant increase in the number of clients who are seeking support, both on the telephone and by email. In fact, the recent federal budget recognizes growing demand, allocating new funds for increasing the number of IRCC call centre agents.
As demand for our services continues to increase, we recognize the need to transform the way we work so we can serve clients faster and strengthen our immigration system for everyone. While the volume of applicants is growing across our business lines, so too are our clients' expectations of quick, streamlined and electronic services. This means we must communicate with them more clearly and more often and ensure that our processes are clear, efficient and easy for both applicants and our employees.
The Auditor General's report highlights three key concerns we must address: difficulty in reaching call centre agents, lengthy wait times before speaking to an agent, and a need for clear, client-focused service standards upon which to measure performance and results. The findings of this audit also confirm that we must deliver accessible, timely and quality service to ensure that the country remains globally competitive in attracting newcomers. Today I'd like to describe some of the changes we are making.
IRCC employees provide support to clients through three channels: telephone inquiries, email assistance through the online web form, and social media. In addition to these channels, the department is working to provide clients with enhanced self-service options online.
The client support centre plays a significant role in communicating with clients. Last fiscal year, its agents responded to over 1.6 million client inquiries by phone and email, an increase of more than 12% from the previous year.
To improve the call centre and overall client experience, we have taken a number of actions. For economic permanent resident programs, we are piloting a new callback feature to give clients who reach our telephone wait queue the option of having an agent call them back instead of having to wait on hold. We are testing this functionality with this client group before expanding the service to other programs. We have also improved self-service features through our interactive voice response telephone messaging. This makes it easier for callers to obtain general and case status information without having to speak to an agent.
Budget 2019 announced $42.9 million over two years for IRCC to provide clients with better access to support when they need it. This funding will allow us to hire more call centre agents and expand some local Canadian office hours in 2019, and to expand hours of operations at the client support centre in 2020. As well, IRCC has lowered its email response time, from 31 business days in June 2017 to less than five business days as of March 2019. The additional funding received in budget 2019 will help to further reduce this email response time.
We know that to really address call volumes we need to address the root of the problem. One of the key reasons that people call and utilize ATIP processes is for information on their case status. We also receive many calls from people inquiring about the renewal of their permanent residence cards. We are making progress in reducing processing times in almost all of our permanent residence streams and have recently brought processing times for permanent residence cards down considerably. We anticipate that the progress we are making in these key areas will help reduce call volumes.
IRCC continues to look for new ways to improve the client experience and provide access to information. To provide clients with the information they need and to strengthen online access, the department has taken steps to make it easier for clients to navigate our website and to submit their online applications 24 hours a day.
Promoting self-service online for clients has been a priority. Our online help centre has over 1,100 questions and answers to top inquiries. We assure our web content is easy to use and understand, by writing in plain language at about a grade 8 reading level. We also optimize our web content to ensure it ranks high in search results, making it easier to find information. I think it's important to note as well that, before we launch new tools on our web templates, we do usability testing with people outside our departments and with clients.
Tracking the progress of case information is a high priority for many of our clients. To this end, we are testing new ways to better display case status information, to communicate processing times and to allow clients to track the progress of their applications. Our overall goal is to help clients with simple inquiries to access the information they need online, reduce their need to speak to an agent and, therefore, give agents a greater ability to focus on more complex cases.
IRCC is also working to finalize and publish service standards for its client support centre in our support services to make the department more accountable in its actions.
Before closing, allow me to note our actions to strengthen our ability to address a new and rapidly growing development: the substantial increase of social medial inquiries. In 2018, IRCC answered more than 130,000 social media general inquiries, seven times the total of the previous year and something we expect to continue to increase.
To help us manage these increasing volumes on social media, last fall we launched Quaid, a social media chatbot that responds to clients' general questions about immigration and citizenship. Quaid uses artificial intelligence to answer general questions from our clients on Facebook Messenger and continues to learn as it engages with people. Although this project is in its early stages, we expect Quaid will become more sophisticated with time and will improve our ability to interact with our clients.
Providing excellent client service is imperative so that Canada continues to remain globally competitive to attract visitors, students, skilled workers and new Canadians, the people who directly contribute to our overall economic, cultural and social prosperity. We will continue to act on our vision to transform how we interact with clients and provide the best possible support in the long term.
I'm happy to take any questions. Thank you, Mr. Chair.