The Public Service Pay Centre in Miramichi, N.B., the home of the Pay Pod people. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Ron Ward

After more than two years, Canada’s public servants can finally call a Phoenix client centre and talk to colleagues who can help sort out their botched cheques and other pay questions.

Public Service and Procurement Canada (PSPC) is replacing contract employees at two call centres with 200 permanent employees who have been trained in Phoenix and the federal pay regime.

Employees at these revamped ‘client contact centres’ have access to the Phoenix system and will be able to retrieve the pay records of calls for help, to report an underpayment or overpayment or just to make sense of their pay stubs.

“This is a big leap forward — and we are meeting the service standards. People are waiting much less time on the phone with an average time of 44 seconds,” said Steven MacKinnon, parliamentary secretary for the PSPC minister.

The centres are in Toronto and Gatineau. The exact locations are not revealed for security reasons. MacKinnon was speaking after he and Hull-Aylmer Liberal MP Greg Fergus visited the Gatineau operation as part of the official launch of the new approach.

Staff can now access employee files and track transactions but fixing financial transactions will be left to the pay centre. MacKinnon said the typical transaction is taking about 11 minutes.

He added that the department began the approach last fall and so far, he says, the service is better, faster and public servants are report being satisfied.

The centre has answered about 32,000 calls. Over the past six months, 77 per cent of callers said their inquiry was answered and 83 per cent said they were “satisfied with the overall experience.”

He said the department is looking at expanding services to handle minor transactions, such as updating personal information, or routine actions such as sending copies of T4 slips. That would take further pressure off the non-financial transactions that clog the system.

The department is confident that the new call centre, coupled with the pay pods being rolled out across government by mid-2019, will help resolve pay issues faster and chip away at the massive backlog of transactions sitting in the queue at Miramichi pay centre.

The call centres have been a big source of friction between the government and unions who argued Phoenix problems should be resolved by public servants and not outsourced. The Public Service Alliance of Canada made hiring more and “permanent” staff for the centre a key demand of a sweeping resolution it recently passed at its triennial convention.

The government created the call centre in the summer of 2016 as Phoenix’s errors escalated into a full crisis with thousands of public servants overpaid, overpaid or not paid at all.

Public servants complained the centre couldn’t handle the barrage of calls and staff were ill-equipped to even answer basic questions. The most they could do was answer the phone; record the complaint or query and pass it on. That for the calls that got through. As many or more were dropped; left on hold or faced incessant busy signals.

The lack of confidence in the centres came to a head in January when they were swamped with calls from public servants racing to report their overpayments for a tax deadline.

MacKinnon acknowledged that the biggest complaint MPs get from the federal employees in their ridings was about the centre … how questions went unanswered and how they were left in the dark.

MacKinnon said the the centres’ revamp and new hires will be covered by the $431 million PSPC received in the 2018 budget to stabilize Phoenix. The largest piece — $307 million — will be spent this year to cover hiring more compensation advisers, human resource staff and improving systems. The main vendor is IBM, which built Phoenix under a contract that expires in 2019.

The pod teams at Miramichi will work directly with departments. They will become experts in the collective agreements and the unique pay rules to a department. In some cases, departments with similar pay regimes or work will be clustered and served by a pod.

It is also a “whole person approach,” with teams resolving all the pay issues of an employee instead of tackling them by transaction, such as maternity leave or disability.

The transition to ‘pay pods’ begins with three new pods for 12 more departments by the end of May, followed by another wave in September.