Human Resources committee  Our audit didn't focus on that specific aspect. But during our discussions, we learned that it was a combination of factors, including the availability of resources, but also the age of the technology used for call centres, which doesn't always allow for additional resources or t

Human Resources committee  This may be a combination of both factors, a lack of human resources and technological limitations. To give you a hypothetical example, some of the EI call centres don't have the ability to transfer calls they couldn't handle to another centre due to lack of resources and would h

Human Resources committee  We haven't checked this aspect.

Human Resources committee  If I can add to this, what Monsieur Ricard just alluded to is a survey done by the Institute for Citizen-Centred Service, which is a non-profit intergovernmental organization. It's not as if we went to service standards that are being applied by private organizations or private c

Human Resources committee  I'll ask Ms. Murphy to add to this, but basically we were looking at the possibility of studying call centres of different tenures: some that are significantly large, others that are medium-sized, and smaller sized as well. We also had to consider our own capacity. It's not a sa

Human Resources committee  Exhibit 1 of the report talks about the differences among the call centres of the departments. The exhibit speaks for itself. With regard to employment insurance, only 52% of people who wanted to talk to an agent could talk to an agent. With the Canada pension plan, it's 49%. IRC

Human Resources committee  Basically the first recommendation is that some departments, including Employment and Social Development Canada, should review how they manage incoming calls to improve access to agents. They should consider practices such as allowing callers to decide if they prefer to wait, use

Human Resources committee  They have a quality control mechanism in place, yes, but we did not audit that.

Human Resources committee  No, we can't really comment.

Human Resources committee  That's right. The only thing we can say to that is that this is one of the standards the guideline recommends, which is the accuracy standard. None of the departments we audited had an accuracy standard.

Human Resources committee  Indeed, it's for the calls that reached an agent. The department verifies that 80% of calls reached an agent in the eight minutes set. Although the department tracks redirected and blocked calls, or calls where the caller hangs up while on hold, that data isn't disclosed publicl

Human Resources committee  Based on this, we focused on calls where the person wanted to talk to an agent and did not want to use the department's automated system or other options. That being said, we did take a quick look at the automated system, but unfortunately the department does not keep sufficient

Human Resources committee  The scope of the audit was fiscal year 2017-18.

Public Accounts committee  Basically we're talking mostly about IT infrastructure, as well as software, in that specific case. Associated with that would be training and a review of the various functionalities that would be added with this new technology that would allow the departments to become more effi

Public Accounts committee  I don't know what the exact software is, whether it came from an existing company, but the implementation of the software is currently being done by IBM under Shared Services Canada.