Veterans Affairs Committee on May 10th, 2012

[Dick Harris, Conservative, Cariboo—Prince George, BC]

In closing, I'm going to put you on the spot. You're trying new initiatives, a lot of different things. Can each one of you, in a quick statement, tell us how satisfied you are with what you've been trying? Just briefly, where do you think you can go next to improve the service and contact with the vets even more?

[Colleen Soltermann]

My team was put in place a little over a year ago, so we're still in the learning phase, the development phase of where we want to go. Our younger CF veterans are often out in the community, but they're often also using technology a lot more than we have in the past. While not forgetting that we have to continue to provide services to individuals face to face whenever possible, Veterans Affairs Canada has to learn how we can maximize the Internet and technologies to reach them and make sure they know about our programs and services.

[Krista Locke]

I would add a similar statement: that investing in technology I feel is the way we can improve not only our outreach but also our service to veterans. The feedback to date is that they would like to be able to self-serve and go to our site and get more information, so we are looking at ways to improve that.

[Dick Harris, Conservative, Cariboo—Prince George, BC]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Greg Kerr]

Thank you very much.

We're going to Mr. Stoffer and then Ms. Morin.

[Peter Stoffer, NDP, Sackville—Eastern Shore, NS]

Krista, you had indicated that when veterans call the 1-866 number some of the calls are handled by Service Canada. Is that correct?

[Krista Locke]

That's correct. We entered a partnership in January.

[Peter Stoffer, NDP, Sackville—Eastern Shore, NS]

Is there a private company called Quantum that also handles some of those calls?

[Krista Locke]

I don't have all the details, but I understand that, yes, we are in partnership with Service Canada, and in turn they ensure there is a group of individuals who respond to callers.

[Peter Stoffer, NDP, Sackville—Eastern Shore, NS]

Quantum is a private company that answers the phone at Veterans Affairs Canada. How is a private company able to tell veterans that they're not Veterans Affairs Canada, yet they answer the phone as Veterans Affairs Canada? I wonder how that ever took place.

[Krista Locke]

I'm not closely involved in the partnership, so I'm not able to answer.

[Peter Stoffer, NDP, Sackville—Eastern Shore, NS]

Is it possible for you to get that information for us?

[Krista Locke]

Yes.

[Peter Stoffer, NDP, Sackville—Eastern Shore, NS]

Thank you.

[Isabelle Morin, NDP, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine, QC]

Thank you very much.

To continue on from what my colleague said, I would like to talk about Twitter, which I like and use a lot. It's a technology of my generation. While we were talking, I looked to see what was going on on Twitter.

I'm surprised to see that there are close to 2,000 people following the English Twitter feed and only 300 following the French one. What are you going to do to get francophone Canadians interested in it? Actually, you apparently aren't using a good approach to reach out to them because you have had only 300 people following you since you started, so for just about a year now.

[Colleen Soltermann]

Thank you for that observation.

We are continuing to promote the use of our Twitter feed. It's a good observation, and I am going to bring it back to the department so we can look into it. I'm not necessarily the best person to answer your question, but it's a good observation.

[Isabelle Morin, NDP, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine, QC]

I'm going to carry on with this because I like it.

I don't want to be overly critical, but there have been 400 tweets in one year. That doesn't seem like very many to me. You may think it's a good way to reach out to people, but personally, I've been using Twitter for less than a year and I have close to 4,000 tweets. That's a big difference. If you want to use this method to reach out to people, they need to see the tweets. I'd like to see an improvement in that respect because you said that using social media was a priority for you.

When we look at your tweets, we see that many more of them have to do with the minister than the department. I would also like you to explain that to me. Why focus your tweets on the minister rather than the department?

[Colleen Soltermann]

I don't have an answer for that. I can't explain the department's approach in that respect. I know the technology is something fairly new for the department. I'm not the best person to explain the difference, but I can certainly provide you with that information if necessary.

[Isabelle Morin, NDP, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine, QC]

I would really like you to send it to the committee.

[Colleen Soltermann]

Okay.

[Isabelle Morin, NDP, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine, QC]

Thank you.

I have no other questions.

I'll give the floor to Ms. Perreault.

[Manon Perreault, NDP, Montcalm, QC]

This will be very simple.

Outreach came up earlier. We are talking about it because we want to foster interest in some issue. I thought to myself that if you are going to contact people, if you are trying to communicate with them, there needs to be some follow-up. It's really important to know what the results were, if any.

I don't know if you talked about it, but I feel that it will be difficult to tally the results you'll subsequently get.

[Colleen Soltermann]

Are you talking about our outreach efforts?

[Manon Perreault, NDP, Montcalm, QC]

Yes.

[Colleen Soltermann]

We have developed a framework that provides parameters that indicate whether we attained our intended goals. I don't know the term in French, but in English we call it a

performance measurement plan.

It's a plan that sets out standards that we must comply with. We measure ourselves against it. So we will be able to know if we have attained the objective based on the indicators that we will have established. With respect to outreach in particular, we have a plan that will help us determine if there is an impact.

I would also like to talk about something else. We are doing research on public opinion. I think that's what we call it. This initiative will help us measure the scope of our outreach efforts with our target clientele. We are currently carrying out a project. We intend to have focus groups that we will interview to determine how much they know about the department's programs and services. The research is currently qualitative. In the coming years, we will carry out quantitative research to determine whether we are making progress with respect to outreach on the programs and services.