Bilingual citizen contact centre for a federal government department

The department was failing its own service standards on call answer time, and the failures were concentrated in French. Wait times in French were consistently longer than in English, which under the Official Languages Act is not simply a performance problem but a question of equality of service. The internal team could not recruit bilingual agents fast enough in the National Capital Region, where every federal employer competes for the same candidates.

We built a bilingual managed service across two sites, drawing bilingual capacity from the Quebec talent pool rather than competing for it in Ottawa. That single sourcing decision solved the constraint that had blocked the department for two years.

Delivery is genuinely bilingual rather than English-first with French routing. Agents are hired to a French standard and calibrated in French by French-first quality staff. Both language queues carry identical service level targets, identical staffing ratios and identical quality frameworks, and performance is reported separately by language so that a gap cannot hide inside a blended number.

All processing sits within Canada. Security screening was completed to the level the prime contractor's agreement required, and records are retained to the department's schedule.

Managed service with volume bands and per-language service levels, Ontario and Quebec sites, governance monthly with the prime and quarterly with the department.

Service level achieved in both official languages within the first full quarter, and the French and English gap closed to under two percentage points from a starting point the department described as unacceptable. Abandonment fell by 61 percent. Bilingual capacity reached full establishment eleven weeks faster than the department's own prior recruitment runs had achieved. No official languages complaints substantiated against the service during the first year.

The department framed this as a capacity problem. It was a sourcing problem. Recruiting bilingual staff where bilingual staff actually live, rather than where the office is, removed the constraint entirely.