Question Period Note: 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?

• Through Budget 2020 and COVID-19 response measures, from April 2020 to March 2021, ESDC nearly tripled the capacity of the EI Call Centre from 1,100 to over 3,000 agents and has maintained this capacity in 2021-22.
• Service provided by EI Call Centres to Canadians has improved significantly as a direct result of these enhancements:
• In 2020-21, the EI Call Centre answered 5.6M calls and the average wait time was 1 hour and 2 minutes.
• In 2021-22, as of October 22, 2021, the EI Call Centre answered 4M calls and is currently on track to answer over 7.0M calls by the end of the fiscal year, with a Year-to-Date average wait time of 12 minutes.
• As a result, EI Call Centre wait times have been cut by more than 85%, from an average 85 minutes in January 2021 to approximately 12 minutes for the week ending October 22, 2021.

Through Budget 2016, the Government of Canada invested $73M over a two-year time span to increase the number of call centre agents from approximately 800 to 1,100 agents to improve the accessibility to Employment Insurance (EI) Call Centre agents and to reduce call wait times for Canadians. Through Budget 2018, the Government of Canada invested $127.7M to maintain the increased capacity for an additional three years.

On top of the final year of the Budget 2018 investment ($29.5M), the Government of Canada invested an additional $420.0M over 2 years in Budget 2020 to increase EI Call Centre capacity to 3,000 agents in the first year and maintain that capacity in the second year to ensure that Canadians continue to have timely access to the benefits to which they are entitled.

The EI Call Centres serve as clients’ primary point of contact to discuss details pertaining to their individual benefit account, including account-specific information and assistance over the telephone.

ESDC migrated its key call centres to the Hosted Contact Centre Solution (HCCS), a modern technology to deliver efficient and enhanced contact centre services to Canadians and support improved workload management.
• The Employer Contact Centre migrated on October 26, 2018;
• The Pensions Specialized Call Centre migrated on May 13, 2019; and
• The EI Specialized Call Centre migrated on March 11, 2020.

Migration of call centres to the HCCS platform has enabled the department of ESDC to increase call centre queue capacity so all clients can get through and wait to speak to an agent, including ESDC’s most vulnerable clients. Increasing accessibility to virtually 100% allows more clients the choice to wait to speak with an agent or to hang up and call at a later time; however, allowing all callers to access the queue can subsequently lead to longer wait times during periods of high call volume. HCCS has allowed all call centre agents to be able to telework and critically supported the Government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

• Service Canada’s primary performance measures for call centres are 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, while wait times are the amount of time that callers have to wait before they can speak to an agent.
• The Department received Budget 2020 funding to nearly triple Employment Insurance (EI) Call Centre capacity from 1,100 to 3,000 agents in 2020-21 and maintain the newly acquired capacity in 2021-22.
• During the 2020-21 fiscal year, EI Call Centres quadrupled the Interactive Voice Response (IVR) capacity to allow more callers to be able to self-serve via the automated system. Further, the EI Call Centres more than doubled the number of callers that can wait to speak to an agent, rather than be asked to call back at another time.