Working with Customers
Annual Report
August 1, 2019 – July 31, 2020
We’re always looking for ways to help customers find out about our complaint-handling process and make it easier for them to access our services. This section discusses our activities and results in 2019-20.
Website
Our website is a key tool for helping customers find us. According to our customer surveys, 31% of customers report first learning about the CCTS through an online search. This percentage is the same as last year’s results.
Our website is also a focus for customers who want to file complaints. In 2019-20, 87% of the complaints we accepted were filed by customers using the “Submit a Complaint” interactive questionnaire on the website.
There were close to 467,000 website visits this year, a decrease of 7% from last year. However, website visits have increased in recent years as ever-more people go online to use self-service tools. This was the case with the “Submit a Complaint” interactive questionnaire, which had 50,000 sessions last year but close to 57,000 sessions this year.
Accessibility
The CCTS has always been mindful of its responsibility to be responsive to the diverse needs of the public and to provide everyone with an equal opportunity to use our services, in line with the best practices of the Accessible Canada Act, which was passed in June of 2019 and provides for the development of accessibility standards. Providing accessible customer service so that persons with disabilities can reach us easily and make use of our processes is one of our core values. We provide customer service in a manner that accommodates persons with disabilities and reflects the principles of independence, dignity, integration and equality of opportunity.
We provide training on accessible customer service to all the CCTS employees, directors, volunteers and others who communicate with the public or third parties on behalf of the CCTS.
We also conduct annual consultations with groups representing Canadians with disabilities. Based on their feedback, all of our videos are closed captioned and have an American Sign Language/Langue des signes québécoise (ASL/LSQ) version.
In 2020, we had consultations with participants from five accessibility groups. We learned that the CCTS is still not well known throughout the accessibility community. The participants expressed a willingness to help us spread the word within their networks though their websites, newsletters and town halls. The CCTS will invest its time and provide materials to help with this process.
We also learned that some functionalities on the CCTS website require attention to improve usability for disabled users. These issues will be addressed early in the 2020-21 fiscal year.
Every two years, we perform an accessibility analysis of our website to ensure that current content plus any new content added meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1.
As of the 2018-2019 Mid-Year Report, our annual and mid-year reports are provided in HTML format for accessibility, to optimize the reading experience for those who use screen readers and other assistive technology. (Previous mid-year and annual reports are provided in PDF versions that are tagged for accessibility.)
At the request of the CRTC and members of the accessibility community, we have also implemented a process to track accessibility-related issues that appear in customer complaints.
For more information about our policies and guidelines, see our Accessibility web page.
“The CCTS resolved the problem in 2 days after I had tried for a month.”
Customer survey results
We survey customers who use our service for two reasons:
- to get their impressions of the work we do and refocus our efforts for improvement
- to attempt to measure the success of the public awareness initiatives we undertake with service providers
The results are based on close to 4,700 responses. We thank the customers who took the time to participate in the survey and share their views.
Numbers for all results were rounded.
What customers said about the CCTS
We asked our customers for the following information:
Is it important to have an independent organization to deal with telecom and TV complaints that has the authority to provide customers with compensation?
Was it easy to file your complaint with the CCTS?
Feedback on whether the service you received from our customer service representatives met your expectations.
Feedback on whether the service you received from our complaint resolution officers met your expectations.
Feedback on overall sense of satisfaction with various aspects of our process.
Timelines: Did we complete our work in a reasonable amount of time?
Professionalism: Were we professional, knowledgeable and courteous?
Impartiality: Did we act without favoritism to either you or your service provider?
What customers said about service provider public awareness activities
How did you first find out about the CCTS?
Service providers have committed to notify customers about the CCTS during their internal complaint-handling process. We asked our customers:
Did your service provider tell you about the CCTS during your efforts to resolve the problem?
Service providers are required to print a prescribed message about the CCTS on customer bills four times a year. We asked our customers:
Have you ever seen the notice on any of your bills?
Service providers have committed to placing a prescribed notice about the CCTS in a reasonably prominent place on their websites and to include a link to the CCTS website. We asked our customers:
Have you seen this notice and link?
“Our service provider resolved the issues within a few days after we submitted a complaint.”
What customers said about their interactions with service providers concerning issues
We asked customers about their interactions with service providers before the CCTS became involved.
How long did you try to resolve your problem directly with your service provider before bringing your complaint to the CCTS?
How many levels of escalation (front line customer service, supervisor, manager, etc.) did your complaint go through with the service provider before you filed a complaint with the CCTS?