To say Manitoba Public Insurance‘s call centre has been busy these days is a bit of an understatement.
Complaints first came to light about two weeks ago when callers to MPI had difficulty getting through to an operator, many of whom instead got a recorded message asking them to be patient and to call again later.
While MPI originally suggested the increased number of calls was temporary and unusual, it hasn’t died down and operators are still overwhelmed.
According to an MPI spokesman, the call volume for the week of Feb. 18 was a whopping five times greater than it was at the same time last year.
“To give you some perspective on what we’re dealing with here, at one point we had nearly 60,000 calls placed to the contact centre,” MPI’s Brian Smiley told 680 CJOB.
“The same time period a year previous, we had almost 12,000 calls.”
Smiley said MPI is trying to compensate for the massive increase in calls by making some staffing changes, but it’s an uphill battle.
“We have absolutely added more staff,” he said. “We redeployed some staff, we’ve moved some supervisors over to the phone lines. We’ve asked staff to work extra hours, and right now, in fact, we’re hiring more staff for our contact centre.”
Smiley said MPI staff have noticed an interesting trend in conjunction with the increase call volume.
“Many of the calls coming to our contact centre have area codes of 604 and the new Manitoba area code of 431, so these are people still in B.C. planning to move to Manitoba.”
The increase appears to be linked to out-of-province drivers attempting to come to Manitoba to take advantage of trucking jobs, but in order to get a Class 1 professional driver’s licence, a basic Class 5 is necessary, and that requires proof of Manitoba residency.
MPI released numbers Wednesday indicating that Class 5 licence applicants require two or more attempts on average before passing their road tests, but Smiley said that’s a sign the system is working.
“We don’t want drivers on the roads who aren’t prepared to get on the roads and drive with you and me,” he said.
“The test is basically a real-life test, so people are failing, but keep in mind a lot of these Class 5ers are novice drivers – they’re youngsters, they’re coming out of Driver Ed, and some of them haven’t gone through the Driver Ed program.”
WATCH: Callers to MPI frustrated, told to call back later
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