Callers to Government of Canada call centres couldn’t reach an agent in half of 16 million calls placed last year, while agents accidentally hung up on some million calls, Canada’s federal watchdog said Tuesday.

The effectiveness of the government’s call centres was the subject of one of five reports presented by interim Auditor General Sylvain Ricard and tabled in Parliament on Tuesday.

The auditor general’s report looked at call centres operated by three departments — Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC), Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) and Veterans Affairs Canada.

Of these departments, ESDC’s Employment Insurance (EI) line fielded the most calls requesting to speak with an agent, with a total of 8.9 million during the 2017-18 fiscal year. In 48 per cent of those cases, callers either were prevented from reaching an agent or hung up on.

Meanwhile, of the 4.9 million callers to the Canada Pension Plan and Old Age Security (also of ESDC), 51 per cent failed to reach an agent.

Another, 1.7 million callers to IRCC, only 22 per cent reached an agent.

Seventy-nine per cent of the 208,000 callers to VAC were answered by an agent, which was the highest agent answering frequency reported to the auditor general.

A survey conducted by the Institute for Citizen-Centred Service in 2018 found phone calls were the third most common means of reaching the government, behind in person visits and online queries.

Callers to call centres are often seeking information necessary to receive various Government of Canada benefits, or to find out the status of an application for services.

Federal call centres are especially important for people who are visually impaired, have other intellectual or physical disabilities, or live in remote regions, the report noted.

In the same 2018 survey, Canadians said they expected to wait on the phone for an average of seven minutes.

Those wait times, the auditor general found, weren’t always a reality.

While, callers to Veteran’s Affairs Canada or individuals with queries about the Canada Pension Plan and Old Age Security saw wait time of five minutes, the auditor general found, folks who called the federal immigration department waited on average 32 minutes before speaking to an agent.

Calls about employment insurance were generally connected within eight minutes.

The auditor general’s report also concludes that call centres were not focused on the needs of their clients. Centres sometimes overstated their performance results and didn’t have service standards related specifically to their callers’ needs.

One example listed in the report is Veteran Affairs’ decision to discontinue its teletypewriter (TTY) service that aided callers who were deaf and hard of hearing — a decision that was made without first consulting with or telling veterans, the auditor general’s office said.

Veteran’s Affairs has not provided the auditor general’s office with any reasoning for that decision. In response to the auditor general’s report, the department said it will extend its TTY service to its National Contact Centre Network.

The report also says that each of the departments couldn’t show that the standards they had set for how promptly an agent picked up the phone stemmed from feedback from clients on their expected wait times.

Modernization ‘will take years’

Shared Services Canada (SSC) was tasked with transforming the government’s infrastructure technology infrastructure (including its call centres) in 2011.

In 2013, the department set out to modernize the government’s call centres on a common new system by 2020. Two years later the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat was given $6 million over five years as well as $800,000 per year to create a new service strategy as part of a single online platform for all government services.

The auditor general states in its report that modernizing call centres was delayed years because SSC underestimated the cost and work needed to upgrade the government’s systems.

In 2017, Shared Services Canada realized it would be too expensive to transfer all 221 call centres to a new system by 2020 so it changed its plan to move eight over by 2018 with the remaining 213 centres to be upgraded in a second phase.

So far, just eight of the centres have been upgraded, with the first phase not expected to be completed until 2020.

The auditor general said Tuesday that Shared Services Canada hasn’t yet completed a plan for how to upgrade the remaining 213 facilities or figured out what the cost of doing so will be.

The federal ministers responsible for the departments mentioned in the auditor general’s report on call centres released a joint statement after the report was published on Tuesday, saying that they are already working to improve the functionality of the centres.

“Significant work is underway across our departments to provide tangible, specific solutions that respond to people’s shifting needs and heightened expectations in today’s service climate,” said the statement.