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Social Development Ministry Not a Smooth Operator When Answering the Phone

Clients calling ministry for help waited more than 90 minutes on average during worst days to speak to a real person.

Andrew MacLeod 19 Apr 2018TheTyee.ca

Andrew MacLeod is The Tyee's Legislative Bureau Chief in Victoria. Find him on Twitter or reach him here.

For every 25 calls some of B.C.'s most vulnerable residents made to the Ministry of Social Development and Social Innovation in 2016, only one was answered within half an hour.

On the worst days in 2017 callers to the ministry had to wait on average for more than 90 minutes to talk to someone, according to a report this week from the province's ombudsperson. At times the waits stretched well above two hours.

"For the past number of years, people served by the ministry have faced significant delays when making inquiries or attempting to obtain assistance by telephone," Ombudsperson Jay Chalke wrote in Holding Pattern: Call Wait Times for Income and Disability Assistance.

While the ministry has been transitioning to providing more service by phone or online rather than meeting people in person, the issues have not improved, he wrote. "Problems of delay, dropped calls, long wait times and poor communication have persisted."

The ministry provides welfare and disability payments to some of the province's most vulnerable people, Chalke said. "Compounding many of these service issues is the reality that income and disability assistance recipients face challenges arising from their life circumstances, including poverty, homelessness, health issues and disability."

The government needs to make sure it is accommodating the needs of its clientele, and it's questionable whether the shift to online and phone service was appropriate, he said.

Concerns about long phone wait times go back to at least 2010 when The Tyee reported that advocates were having an increasingly difficult time reaching ministry staff. At the time the ministry said calls were answered within between seven to 10 minutes on average.

As of February 2017, according to this week's report, the ministry was receiving 125,000 calls a month. The ministry had a goal of answering each call within 30 minutes but had been taking longer. "The annual average for 2016 was 43 minutes and 33 seconds and the [30-minute] goal was met only four per cent of the time."

The report found "the average call wait times at the ministry's provincial contact centre are chronically and consistently unreasonably long," and that the reason the ministry fails to provide a reasonable level of service is that it doesn't employ enough people in the contact centre.

Recommendations included hiring at least 220 full-time staff, an increase of 40 from the current roster, dedicated to answering calls. By next year it should aim to get average wait times down below 10 minutes most days and never longer than 30 minutes, the report said.

"The ministry has declined to follow our timeliness recommendation, instead committing to a more modest improvement, albeit while making the other service quality improvements we recommended," Chalke wrote, adding the ministry had chosen to add just 20 staff positions to the contact centre.

The report also said the ministry should develop and make public by September its standards for how long it should take to receive in-person service. Investigators were "surprised" to learn that no such standards now exist, it said.

Shane Simpson, the minister for social development and poverty reduction, as the ministry was renamed in July, said he was pleased with the report and the government has already begun acting on it.

"I think it reflects some of the comments we made when we were in opposition," he said. "I also think it's a reflection frankly of the level or lack of level of resourcing that the previous government put into some of those areas and the lack of priority that this ministry had at the cabinet table. We're looking to change that."

The government added 30 full-time staff to the ministry in its February budget and most of them are dedicated to the call service, he said. "We've been making some improvements. When you look at the report, we've been bringing it down, but I think we do have more work to do."

The consultation that's underway on developing a poverty reduction strategy for the province has also been hearing a lot about services and how they are delivered, he said, noting that report will be out in June.

Simpson said he'll be meeting with officials in the ministry in the coming days to talk about expectations for service delivery and how to meet those expectations.

"The previous government pushed almost everything into the call system with very few exceptions, and I think there does have to be a conversation about whether there are groups of the people who receive support from the ministry that in fact need to receive service in different ways because of the complexity of their needs," Simpson said.

"That's taking a little time. I'm trying to understand that better and how we approach that in ways that are effective and efficient."  [Tyee]

Read more: BC Politics

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