Global Affairs Canada is the department of the Government of Canada that manages Canada’s diplomatic and consular relations, international trade, and international development and humanitarian assistance.
In 2021, Global Affairs Canada (GAC) only offered email and phone support to their broad stakeholder audience. They recognized that this lack of channel choice, coupled with these channels’ slow response times and inaccessibility, was harming the user’s experience. The need, and opportunity, to improve their service offering with digital communication was evident.
This became all the more apparent during the 2024 Paris Olympics, where the Emergency Watch and Response Center (EWRC) played a critical role. It’s a 24/7 operations hub in Ottawa that supports every Canadian embassy abroad.
When crises hit, whether natural disasters, political upheavals, or major events like the Paris Summer Olympics, the EWRC needs to scale support immediately. That means deploying surge personnel on short notice and handling dramatic spikes in inquiries across multiple channels and languages.
To solve this issue with one piece of software, GAC adopted Comm100. Following a successful pilot, GAC partnered with Comm100 and adopted its Omnichannel platform with live chat, AI chatbot, and WhatsApp.
With these three channels added to their service offering, GAC now offers convenient, accessible, and fast support to their stakeholders:
- Comm100 Live Chat provides real-time resolution with a short 57 second wait time,
- Two Comm100 AI Chatbots (now AI Agent) deliver 24/7 assistance in either English or French
- WhatsApp support ensures GAC are meeting their stakeholders where they are.
“What we do involves new personnel all the time,” explains Thomas Paré-Raymond, Operations Officer at EWRC. “It involves surge personnel that can come in any minute because of a crisis that we need to train and be able to give just a quick five to 10 minute presentation of what it is and be like, go, go, go—answer some questions. There’s a couple hundred people waiting.”
The adoption of Comm100 AI Chatbot has also increased GAC’s support capacity. The two chatbots handle 78% of incoming chats, resolving common questions to give agents more time to spend on complex queries. The bot also serves another important function for GAC – filtering and offloading queries. Around 75% of all GAC’s chat requests are intended for different government departments and can’t be answered by their team. Rather than consuming agent time with extraneous work, the bot can handle these queries, directing the user to the appropriate resource.
Every channel is connected within Comm100. Whether a user reaches out via WhatsApp or live chat, the message is funneled into a unified agent console. This gives agents visibility into every user and their previous conversation history, empowering them to deliver more helpful and efficient support. Also, agent productivity is improved as agents don’t need to switch between systems or apps.
“Comm100 does exactly what we needed it to do – integrate multiple channels of communication into a single platform so we don’t have to monitor multiple devices and accounts. This improves agent productivity, and most importantly, improves the end user’s experience.” – IT Professional, Global Affairs Canada
WhatsApp support has become GAC’s critical channel for crisis and surge response, particularly during high-stakes events like the Paris Summer Olympics:
Global accessibility: Canadians traveling abroad already use WhatsApp, making it the natural choice for urgent consular assistance
Crisis-ready infrastructure: The platform handles sudden volume spikes without requiring additional agent training or system changes
Real-time surge response: During the Olympics, consular staff in Paris used WhatsApp to manage hundreds of inquiries about event access, safety concerns, and emergency assistance
Unified emergency operations: All WhatsApp messages flow into the same agent console as live chat, giving EWRC operators in Ottawa full visibility into on-the-ground situations
“A lot of people are using WhatsApp in most parts of the world,” says Thomas Paré-Raymond, Operations Officer at EWRC. “That’s a big thing for us—to be able to be reached that way and to have the ability to respond to those high volumes of inquiries in crisis situations.”
