Customer care skills are increasingly important in visa processing. Ensuring that the visa application process is smooth and straightforward can increase the number of tourists, students and business travellers visiting a country. With this in mind, we are implementing Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM) at TLScontact, to monitor and enhance customer experience throughout the visa journey.
International travel has undergone massive change in recent months and there is little sign of a return to normality any time soon. The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have devastated global airlines and travel companies alike. Never before has it been more important to develop, maintain, and perfect customer care skills in order to offer tailored, quality services. This is as true for visa processing as it is for other sectors.
Improving the visa journey – a positive step
At TLScontact, we know how important a smooth visa application process is to our government clients and our visa customers. In this new, post-lockdown era, ensuring that the visa application journey is straightforward is a great way to encourage international travellers to visit, return, study or work in a particular country, bringing with them the professional talents countries need. Our worldwide experience in this sector has shown us clearly that if a visa application is made easy for customers the first time, they are much more likely to return and recommend the service.
TLScontact is continually striving to create the right customer experience and being part of the wider Teleperformance group is an important contributor to these efforts.
Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM) – State-of-the-art expertise
Teleperfomance, our parent company, is well-known and highly respected for its skills in managing customer service for major world brands. As part of the Teleperformance group, TLScontact is able to provide state-of-the-art expertise in customer experience management. One of the key tools at our disposal is the targeted omni-channel approach to collecting and acting on customer feedback known as Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM).
Let’s have a closer look at what EFM does and how TLScontact puts it to work to enhance the visa application journey.
We have integrated the EFM method into our systems to measure the satisfaction of our customers and connect this to their specific customer journey data. This is achieved by sending them surveys at particular moments in the application process. Real-time data is collected and analysed, and our long-term objective is to use these insights to enhance business performance by building smoother and more efficient visa application services.
Strategic touchpoints for customer feedback
In order to ensure that the feedback and comments we gather are accurate and relevant to the specific service provided, customers are contacted at four key, strategically timed touchpoints in the application journey. These touchpoints come:
- After booking an online appointment;
- Once customers have visited the visa centre and biometrics are completed;
- After purchasing an additional service;
- Once their passport has been returned to them at the end of the process.
Data is not only collected on the overall customer scores but also on the specific elements that affect those scores. These may include perceptions of value for money and the service they received; the reasons for withdrawing an application and for not attending an appointment; and the passport return experience. As far as the Visa Application Centres are concerned, feedback from the customer’s experience provides specific information about staff courtesy and efficiency, the quality of the facilities, processing times and their level of satisfaction regarding the convenience of their appointment time.
Detailed data & concrete customer insights
Having reliable, detailed data at our disposal, thanks to the special EFM cognitive machine-learning analytics process, means we can form a precise overview of the specific stages in the path to obtaining a visa. This information can then be used rapidly and confidently to design and implement improvements to the customer visa application journey. Ongoing monitoring allows us to validate and fine-tune the impact of improvements we make. The analysis of direct, real-time data and concrete customer insights is key to producing genuine improvements in customer experience. The precise information that we collect, analyse and use to make recommendations for improvements is based on evidence, not intuition nor hunches. EFM measures what matters: how customers are impacted at the different stages in the process and the effect this has on their levels of satisfaction. This means that we are able to offer a service that exceeds the expectations of our customers and the needs of our government clients.
In 2020, our world changed. Now is the time for us all to take a closer look at how customers perceive the essential services we offer. We know the right questions to ask, when to ask them and thanks to EFM, we can transform the answers into concrete improvements.
Article written by Andy Escott-Carrington,
Account Manager