Question Period Note: EI CALL CENTRES STANDARDS

How is Service Canada leveraging investments to improve access and reduce wait times in its EI call centres?

• The EI Call Centre provides critical support to Canadians navigating the EI benefit process.
• More calls have been answered and the average call centre wait times reduced, but demand remains higher than normal, meaning that some clients will wait longer to reach an agent during peak periods.
• 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 their EI benefits.

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.

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.

Due to the 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.

Budget 2020 and COVID-19 pandemic response measures provided funding to increase capacity and calls answered, and to improve accessibility.

For instance, this funding allowed the Department to ramp up the network to meet demand, where capacity nearly tripled from 1,100 to a peak of more than 3,000 agents at the height of Covid, in order to respond to Canadians on their specific EI applications, eligibility and payment status.

Consequently, for fiscal year 2021-2022, the average wait time was reduced to 20 minutes (compared to the previous fiscal year when it averaged more than an hour) and 1.6 million more calls were answered. Additionally, accessibility increased to 99% (compared to 50% the previous fiscal year).

While the EI Call Centre continues to find innovative ways to enhance the client experience in a post-pandemic era, certain peak periods are expected to result in an influx of call volumes and longer wait times for Canadians.

If pressed on access:
• For some activities, individuals can use one of Service Canada’s online or telephone self-service options, such as obtaining general program information and telephone reporting, to resolve enquiries without waiting to speak to a representative.
• Service Canada offers a teletypewriter (TTY) service for the speech and hearing impaired for the EI program, where TTY clients can leave a detailed message and will be called back by TTY within one business day.
• Service Canada is actively working to modernize the technology it uses to deliver TTY service and is exploring a new solution that would allow calls to be 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.
• Service Canada is also in the process of building the capacity to be able to offer virtual hold where clients waiting in a queue to speak to an agent, will be able to select an option to hang up and be called back when they are the next in line to be answered. This implementation is planned for spring 2023.