Message from the Chair and the Commissioner

It is our honour to present the Commission for Complaints for Telecom-television Services (CCTS) Strategic Plan for the next four years.

After ten years of successful dispute resolution activity for Canadian telecom customers and service providers, in 2017 CCTS’ mandate was expanded by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission to include consumer complaints about retail TV services. This was a strong endorsement for the organization and our mission to provide outstanding dispute resolution services to Canadian consumers and service providers. In mid-2018, we embarked on a strategic planning process to refresh our plan and develop a set of high-priority strategic objectives for the organization.

We have followed a rigorous process to critically evaluate our organization informed by our relationships with key internal and external stakeholders. This process has helped us understand the opportunities and challenges facing the CCTS to provide better quality service to our stakeholders and create a more effective, efficient, transparent and accessible organization.

I am confident that this plan will help us build on our successes within our expanded mandate. Our three strategic priority areas, core to our organization’s mandate, are to:

• Deliver efficient, effective and transparent service to customers and service providers;
• Strengthen our organizational capacity, structure and resilience; and,
• Build a deeper value-added relationship with our stakeholders.

A strategic plan helps provide guidance into the future, but it takes a team to implement it. We look forward to working with our experienced and knowledgeable Board, and our dedicated staff, to continue to make the CCTS a valued partner in Canada’s television and telecommunication industry.

Our History and Mandate

In 2007, the Government of Canada ordered the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), Canada’s telecommunications (telecom) and broadcasting regulator, to create an independent, industry-funded agency to resolve complaints from consumers and small business retail telecom customers: the CCTS. Initially, only Canadian telecom providers with revenues greater than $10 million were required to join. We opened our doors in July 2007 and immediately began to accept and resolve complaints from Canadian telecom consumers about their home phone, long distance, internet, and wireless services.

The CRTC holds public reviews into our structure and mandate to ensure that the CCTS meets consumer and industry needs. The first such review was in 2010. In January 2011, the CRTC ruled that all Canadian telecom providers would be required to join the CCTS. In March 2016, the CRTC again expanded our mandate by adding the authority to accept complaints about TV services, effective September 1, 2017. To reflect our new mandate, we changed our organization’s name to the Commission for Complaints for Telecom-television Services.

In the years after 2011, the CRTC issued three mandatory codes of conduct for service providers: The Deposit and Disconnection Code (issued in November 2011), the Wireless Code (issued in June 2013), and the TV Service Provider Code (issued in January of 2016)[1]. The CCTS was entrusted with administering these codes. We apply code requirements when we investigate complaints, in order to ensure that customers receive the benefit of the protections prescribed for them by these codes. We track and report publicly on service provider compliance with these codes.

As we look to the future, this strategic plan is guided by our mandate to provide exceptional dispute resolution services for stakeholders.

[1] At the time of writing, it is conducting a proceeding for the creation of an Internet Code, which would also be administered by the CCTS.

Our Mission, Vision and Values

In delivering on our mandate and serving our stakeholders, the CCTS is guided each day by our organizational vision, mission, and values.

Our mission

To provide outstanding dispute resolution service to Canadian consumers, telecommunications and television service providers, and always to adhere to our core values and Performance Standards.

Our vision

We are a dynamic organization that adheres to the best principles of customer service in resolving disputes independently, fairly, effectively and efficiently.

Our values

At the CCTS, we proudly embody these values to deliver on our mandate:

Effective: Using appropriate processes for the dispute in question, we deliver fair resolutions in a reasonable time frame.

Rigorous: We carefully analyze disputes, ensure that we fully understand the positions of the parties, and explain our outcomes clearly and logically.

Competent: We understand technology issues, act professionally, and show good judgment.

Unbiased: In keeping with our role as a completely independent arbiter of disputes, we take no side in any dispute.

Fair: We assess the scale and scope of disputes, apply fair process appropriate to the nature of the dispute, and deliver balanced and reasonable outcomes when required to do so.

Responsive: We understand the needs of the disputing parties and work to resolve disputes in a manner that reflects and respects those needs.

Accessible: All consumers, including those with disabilities, can reach us easily and make use of our processes.

These core values that guide us in our service delivery also guide us in the stakeholder relationships that we have built, and continue to build, to support our mandate.

CCTS Core Value Proposition

At the heart of our mandate are the stakeholders we serve. We strive to deliver an outstanding dispute resolution service: efficient, effective, and transparent. As an organization, we always think about the value we bring to our stakeholders. We work to ensure that we always deliver on this value. The value we provide to our key stakeholders is articulated in the figure below.

The strategic priorities set out in this strategic plan are designed to ensure a culture of continuous improvement and effectiveness in delivering on our value promise to our stakeholders.

CCTS Strategic Priorities

With our mandate, vision, mission, values, and value proposition to stakeholders in mind, our goal was to create a strategic plan propelling the CCTS to the next level of organizational maturity over the next four years. We reviewed dozens of ideas and made tough decisions to focus our organization on three key strategic priorities. We are confident that these priorities will build on our current strengths. They will enable us to handle evolving as a service provider and support consumer needs in the marketplace.

Strategic Priority: Deliver an efficient, effective and transparent service delivery to customers and service providers

Service delivery is at our organization’s core. A responsive dispute-resolution process that offers fair, independent and timely outcomes helps both consumers and service providers and builds overall confidence in the telecommunications and television sector.

Our objective over the next four years is to further enhance CCTS’ service delivery model and workflow. We want to continuously strengthen our service efficiency, effectiveness and transparency to customers and service providers. We will review our key operational and service delivery processes and benchmark them to leading practices of similar organizations to identify new opportunities to further strengthen the efficiency and effectiveness of our service delivery capabilities. With the review’s results in hand, we will create and execute against a roadmap to build on our successes and continuously improve the service we deliver. With an initial focus on early opportunities for success, we will plan and resource any required transformative changes and we will monitor, evaluate, and report on our progress to our Board and stakeholders. This will strengthen our culture of continuous improvement to deliver on our mandate.

Strategic Priority: Strengthen organizational capacity, structure and resilience

Our staff are our organization’s greatest asset and strength. Without them, we cannot deliver on our value promise to our stakeholders. Given the degree and pace of change in Canada’s telecommunications and television industries, we must ensure that we have a resilient and scalable organizational structure to respond to consumer issues that arise.

Our objective is to strengthen CCTS’ organizational structure and resilience to support our employees, enhance accountability and drive our ability to scale. We will focus on reviewing our service delivery model. Then, the CCTS will develop a concrete strategy to close gaps in our talent, human resources, infrastructure and performance targeting. The program’s implementation and change management will be important; it will be managed carefully to ensure a stronger organization.

We believe in our employees and their ability to grow at the CCTS. It is critical for our organization to build employee talent, so we can better serve our stakeholders and resolve disputes fairly. Employee resilience will serve the CCTS beyond the 4-year strategic plan into the future. Thus, a key focus area will be to build employee skillsets and talents going forward.

Strategic Priority: Build a deeper value-added relationship with stakeholders

In order to deliver on our mandate and our value promise to our stakeholders, we must have relationships with telecommunications and television consumers and stakeholders built on trust and mutual understanding. The CCTS will build on its efforts to be an organization that adds value, actively engages stakeholders and is seen as an expert voice within the sector.

We will grow the CCTS brand through improved communications and stakeholder engagement strategies. We will begin by consulting with our key stakeholders to create a formalized strategy. It will be focused on building value and positioning us as a trusted dispute resolutions services provider and a voice for insights into the industry’s evolving dynamics. We will responsibly plan for, and invest in, the resources required to improve this function.

We will remain committed to ensuring that the CCTS and its Participating Service Providers continue efforts to raise public awareness of a customer’s right of recourse to the CCTS in the event of an unresolved dispute with a service provider. Through the measures in our public awareness plan, which we have committed to review no later than August 2020, supported by our compliance program, and in all our public-facing activity, the CCTS will continue its efforts to ensure that customers with complaints are made aware of the recourse we offer.

Moving Forward

The adoption of our strategic plan is not the end, it is the beginning. Our next steps are a deeper dive into each strategic priority, building operational and budgeting plans to enable us to deliver on each strategic priority.

As part of this operational and budgeting process, the CCTS Board and Management will develop focused performance measures for each priority. This will ensure we have the information necessary to track performance and adapt our implementation efforts to successfully deliver on our strategy.

To govern the implementation of the plan, the CCTS Board and Management team will undertake the following tasks and activities:

• Key activities associated with delivering on the strategic plan will be reported on a regular basis to the Board, and to key stakeholders through our Annual Report.
• CCTS Management will maintain its operational plan for activities and accountabilities necessary to execute the strategic plan.
• The Board, with Management’s support, will institute an annual strategic plan review. The review process will be used to identify and make adjustments to the plan as necessary to respond to internal and external events.

The CCTS is a valuable Canadian institution. The successful implementation of this strategic plan will strengthen the CCTS as an outstanding dispute resolution service to Canadian consumers, telecommunications and television service providers. The CCTS will continue pursuing a vision, mission and mandate to, ultimately, benefit Canada’s telecommunications and television customers and service providers.