Question Period Note: Operating Investments in Service Canada EI Call Centres

How is Service Canada leveraging investments to improve access and reduce wait times in its EI call centre operations for Canadians?

• The EI Call Centre provides critical support to Canadians navigating the EI benefit process.
• Despite overall improvements, and significant improvements in the number of calls answered and the overall reduction in average call centre wait times, Service Canada is continuing to experience higher than normal demand to the EI Call Centre, meaning during certain peak periods some clients will wait longer to reach an agent.
• Measures continue to be put in place to reduce wait times, better align capacity to call demand, and ensure that Canadians have timely access to the information and support they require in support of EI benefits.
If pressed:
• Service Canada offers a teletypewriter (TTY) service for the speech and hearing impaired for the EI program.
• Individuals can get information on benefits, including details on their claims, and can also submit EI reports.
• The EI TTY service can be reached at 1-800-529-3742, where TTY clients can leave a detailed message and will be called back by TTY within one business day.
• For some activities, individuals can use one of Service Canada’s online or telephone self-service options, such as telephone reporting, to resolve enquiries without waiting to speak to a representative.
• Service Canada is actively working to modernize the technology it uses to deliver TTY service and is exploring a new solution that would improve the client experience. The solution would allow calls to be queued and answered directly by an agent, without the need to leave a message and deliver a service that is comparable to the existing telephone service delivery through the Call Centre.

On March 9, 2020, the EI Call Centre migrated to a new technology platform, which allows virtually all callers to have the ability to wait in queue to speak to an agent. Additionally, the Interactive Voice Response (IVR) quadrupled in capacity to allow more callers to self-serve, resolving 14.1 million calls in 2021-22.

In response to the impacts of the pandemic, EI Call Centre capacity was increased from 1,100 to 3,000 agents by the end of 2020-2021 to increase calls answered and improve accessibility. In 2021-2022 EI Call Centre agents answered 7.2 million enquiries, 1.6 million more than the previous year.

Service Canada’s primary performance measures are based on accessibility, wait times and calls answered. Accessibility represents the percentage of call attempts that successfully reach a call centre queue to speak to an agent.

Due to impacts of the pandemic, in 2020-2021 half of all calls trying to reach an agent received a message indicating to call back as all agents were busy. For those that were able to speak to an agent, the average wait time was over an hour. In 2021-2022, the average wait time was 20 minutes and less than 2% of calls have received a message indicating to call back at another time.

None