Working with customers
Annual Report
August 1, 2023 – July 31, 2024
We are committed to listening to and working with consumers to help achieve our mission of providing an impartial, fair, and effective complaint-handling process.
This section is an overview of what we’ve heard from customers over the past year. Customer feedback plays an important role in shaping how we deliver our services.
Listening to customers
The vision of the Commission for Complaints for Telecom-television Services (CCTS) is to provide exceptional complaint resolution that strengthens Canada’s telecommunications and television landscape. We regularly survey customers who use our service to get their impressions of our work. This helps us to refocus our efforts for improvement. For example, customer feedback helps us to assess the effectiveness of the public awareness initiatives we require Participating Service Providers (PSPs) to implement.
In 2023-24 we received more than 4,900 survey responses from customers. This reflects a higher engagement level with a 5% year-over-year increase in our survey response rate. We are pleased to report that customers continue to be overwhelmingly satisfied with both the service they received from CCTS staff and the ease of filing a complaint.
Note: Numbers may be rounded.
“I truly believe that without your help I would never have had my dispute resolved.”
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 CCTS representatives met your expectations.
Feedback on whether the service you received from our complaint resolution officers met your expectations.
Feedback on overall 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 favouritism to either you or your service provider?
“It took less than a week for my service provider to resolve the complaint when CCTS stepped in. I spent over two months trying to resolve it myself.”
What customers said about service provider public awareness activities
How did you find out about the CCTS?
Service providers must notify customers about the CCTS at a specified point 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:
In the last year, did you see a notice about the CCTS on a bill you received from your service provider?
Service providers are required to place 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:
Did you see a dedicated complaint section on your service provider’s website giving you information about the CCTS?
CCTS requires participating service providers (PSPs) to comply with requirements to inform their customers about the CCTS. The CCTS annually audits select PSP websites and documentation to assess compliance. We engage with non-compliant providers to educate and rectify non-compliance with our provider obligations to promote awareness about the CCTS. Read more about our public awareness compliance work in our 2023 Public Awareness Plan Compliance Report Card.
What customers said about their attempts to resolve complaints with service providers
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?
Nearly 45% of respondents said they tried for more than two months to resolve their problem directly with their service provider before turning to the CCTS for help.
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?
Almost 80% of customers experienced two or more levels of escalation before filing a complaint.
Public awareness of the CCTS
We remain deeply committed to increasing the public’s awareness of the CCTS and the recourse available to consumers through our complaint-handling process.
This past year, we began to implement a more robust public awareness strategy. This new initiative will help us to do three things:
- reach more consumers
- increase consumers’ understanding of who we are and what we do
- help customers know when they should seek our help
We also began efforts to reach vulnerable consumers, and we are planning more activities this year to focus on harder-to-reach consumers.
Building on the success of our first digital campaign in 2022-23, the CCTS continued with more digital and media activities to provide information about the role we play in the telecom and TV ecosystem.
- Social media: We improved the consistency of our social media presence this past year and incorporated paid advertising into our activities. Content was timely, relevant and informational, using visuals and videos to draw in consumer engagement. We saw an increase in positive engagement on social media year-over-year. During a 90-day campaign from May to July 2024, our social media advertising content received more than 15 million views and drove 27,000 visits to our website. We also targeted advertising on social media to harder-to-reach consumers and were able to reach more seniors and rural consumers.
- Search engine marketing and website optimization: We used Google Ad Grants advertising as a not-for-profit to bring information about the CCTS to a wider audience and to make our content more readily available. We also added relevant keywords to our website to make it easier for telecom consumers to find us online.
- Public relations: Our publications and news releases have traditionally been the main way consumers learned about our complaints-handling process. This year, we added new media outreach activities to grow our public awareness efforts. We used a combination of proactive media outreach, responding to media inquiries, and editorial placements. This resulted in the CCTS being mentioned throughout the year in top-tier national media outlets as well as local, community and niche publications. Our 60-second radio spot was picked up more than 300 times across the country and articles mentioning the CCTS had an audience reach of more than 6 million readers.
Our collective activities reached a wide audience and generated a 60% increase in website visitors this year. Building sustained public awareness about the CCTS is a shared responsibility. Together with our stakeholders, we are committed to enhancing the public understanding of the CCTS and our role as a dispute-resolution resource for people in Canada. Partnerships with civil society groups and consumer advocacy organizations increase our visibility and provide meaningful input to our stakeholder relations work.
Commitment to accessibility
A core operating principle of our strategic plan is to ensure that anyone in Canada, including those living with a disability, can reach us and use our services easily. Our commitment is deeply rooted and reflects the principles of the Accessible Canada Act and the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (our head office is located in Ontario). These guide us in upholding values of independence, dignity, integration and equality of opportunity.
We consult with accessibility groups and under-represented and under-served communities every year. This helps us to understand how we can better serve all telecom and television customers in Canada. In 2023-24, we convened a forum with representatives from three accessibility groups. We discussed how to continue to improve public awareness of the CCTS within the accessibility community. The participating groups suggested ways to make our videos and ad content more accessible. They also offered to work with us to further promote awareness of who we are and what we can do for customers.
While we strive to ensure that our services are accessible, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) sets the industry standards and requirements for accessibility of telecom services. We continue to monitor accessibility-related issues within complaints. We refer complaints about accessibility issues to the CRTC to ensure a smooth process for the customer.
For more information about our accessibility policies and guidelines, see our Accessibility web page and Accessibility Plan.
“Escalating to the CCTS was absolutely the best decision. I have a neurologic disorder and lots of cognitive & sensory processing difficulties. I appreciated that when I let the CCTS person that I called know about what accommodations would be helpful to me, they were very much on board and helped make filing a complaint very straightforward.”
Gaining insights on customer experiences
Understanding the diverse needs and challenges of consumers across the country remains a cornerstone of our commitment to serving people in Canada. Twice in 2023-24, we met with our Consumer Advisory Panel, a group composed of a variety of Canadian consumer advocacy groups. Meeting with this panel does two things:
- It allows us to help consumers to better understand our mandate, operations and reporting.
- It helps us to find ways to work with these groups to broaden our outreach to consumers.
This year, we brought together eight groups representing a diversity of interests who, together, represented vulnerable and hard-to-reach consumers and consumers from geographically diverse regions across Canada. During this year’s sessions, we heard about a number of top-of-mind issues that affect customers’ experiences with their telecom and TV service providers. Consumers are navigating more complex telecom and TV service offerings in a world where digital connection is critical, and household spending is under pressure. We gleaned useful insight about topics on which we could provide more guidance for consumers. Consumer groups expressed overall support for our plan to increase public awareness and to tailor specific digital campaigns to individuals in at-risk communities. We continue to look for ways to work with groups in this forum to increase the impact of our public awareness activities. For example, we received valuable feedback on how to make our advertising resonate better with targeted audiences. Consumer groups said that it is important for service providers to tell their customers about the CCTS when they have an unresolved problem. They also suggested ways to increase service providers’ awareness obligations.
Consumer groups also recognized the CCTS Annual Report as a valuable resource. They suggested ways to make our data even more transparent.
We look forward to future discussions with consumer advocacy and accessibility groups as they help us to improve our understanding of the customer experience and the unique needs of vulnerable consumers.