When governments choose an external partner to manage visa application services, quality of service delivery is always a central preoccupation. It is written into the contract, measured through Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), Service Level Agreements (SLAs), and audited against international standards. Recent EU competition policy developments also highlight the importance of competition based on factors beyond price, including quality.
Across industries, companies that build lasting client relationships are those that pursue quality at every step, not simply where it is formally measured. In my experience, contracts and metrics only tell part of the story. Consistently delivering excellent service requires people at every level to understand their role in maintaining high standards. Quality is ultimately not only a contractual requirement, but a shared mindset and culture across the organisation.
Quality management in visa outsourcing: the regulatory framework
Visa outsourcing is a highly sensitive – and therefore highly regulated – activity. Outsourcing companies such as TLScontact handle applicants’ personal data, biometric information and travel documents on behalf of government clients, and are expected to meet strict standards in terms of information security, data privacy, and overall service quality.
In practice, this translates into detailed Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) that define exactly how outsourced services should be managed on a day-to-day basis: how applicants are received, how documents are checked and processed, how data is handled and transferred, and how issues are escalated. Service providers are also required to track and report on a range of KPIs and to meet defined SLAs covering areas such as appointment availability, maximum applicant handling time, and website uptime.
Increasingly, government clients require external validation of an outsourcer’s procedures and systems, in the form of ISO certifications covering areas such as quality management, information security and business continuity.
Read our article on Why ISO certifications matter for government visa outsourcing activities.
Managing quality day to day: the TLScontact approach
At TLScontact, quality management is a group-wide effort, involving our dedicated Quality Management team and Legal & Compliance function, and – above all – our operations teams on the ground. Ultimately, they are the ones who are responsible for delivering services that meet both our internal standards and the specific requirements set by each government client.
Our compliance oversight efforts are structured around a range of internal and external mechanisms. Internally, we have put in place:
- A “Control Tower”: a dedicated team responsible for the daily monitoring of key operational and quality indicators across our global network. The team uses data provided through our TLSconnect CRM software suite to identify trends, monitor performance and support timely action. It also designs, maintains and improves the measurement and reporting tools that support informed decision-making and performance management.
- A Site Compliance Monitoring Team that carries out regular, unannounced on-site and remote audits to verify compliance with group policies, procedures and standards.
- Employee engagement monitoring, through structured surveys and feedback programmes, to help us identify organisational improvement opportunities, enhance the employee experience and – ultimately – support the delivery of consistently high-quality services to applicants and government clients.
External oversight includes:
- TLSclient: TLScontact’s proprietary workflow management platform also provides a channel for government clients to share feedback and report issues identified at their level. For example, its error reporting module allows clients to flag errors found at their level, providing our teams with an additional source of information to assess the effectiveness of internal quality assurance and quality control processes, identify gaps and align promptly on requirements or rules where needed.
- Annual external audits: carried out by reputable international organisations, to provide independent confirmation of our compliance with the highest international standards.
- Customer experience monitoring: daily tracking through our customer feedback platform, complemented by external reviews on platforms such as Google and Trustpilot, giving us a real-time view of applicant satisfaction.
- Mystery shopper missions: conducted at multiple centres throughout the year, providing us with an accurate, first-hand sense of the applicant experience and where it can be improved.
Together, these mechanisms provide objective evidence of our operational performance, compliance and service quality. Using structured frameworks such as DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve, Control), we can then change these insights into concrete continuous improvement actions. We also use them as the basis for transparent discussions with our government clients, to build strong, open partnerships built on mutual trust.
Quality management as a mindset
Processes and audits are essential, but they are not sufficient on their own. Beyond SOPs, SLAs and KPIs, quality has to be deeply embedded in company culture, and embodied by the people who are actually delivering our services and interacting with applicants on a daily basis.
At TLScontact, our objective is to make every single employee feel responsible for maintaining the highest quality standards, and empowered to contribute to improvements when they are needed. This is where “Lean” management practices have proved particularly powerful, promoting a ground-up, collaborative approach to quality and continuous improvement.
Three elements are central to this approach:
- Observation. Following the Lean principle of the “Gemba walk,” we encourage our operations managers to carry out daily tours of our centres to identify any inefficiencies, bottlenecks and unnecessary process complexity. My team and I also carry out regular site visits during the year. The main purpose of this observation work is to assess our SOPs in action: are they being followed properly? If not, why not? Are there aspects of our SOPs that need to be adjusted or improved? Or is further communication, management support or agent training required to strengthen adherence to group procedures? We want to keep our quality framework grounded in the operational reality of our centres, rather than existing only on paper.
- Collaboration. Our centre managers adopt a collaborative approach with their teams, structured around daily or weekly meetings. These Lean “huddles” bring together the whole team at a centre to review performance, identify issues as they arise, and brainstorm potential causes and solutions together. This gives our frontline staff a direct voice in shaping how quality is maintained and improved, and reinforces the sense that quality is everyone’s responsibility, not just the concern of a dedicated team.
We also apply this collaborative approach more broadly throughout our organisation, making sure to share best practices, audit findings and successful improvement initiatives across our global network to accelerate learning and strengthen consistency.
- Structured problem-solving: Finally, we adopt a systematic approach to problem-solving. Each time we identify a problem, we want to look beyond the immediate symptom to understand the root cause, and identify how processes need to change to prevent it recurring. Our approach is built around the Lean A3 problem-solving methodology. Starting from a clear problem statement, it follows a rigorous, eight-step process to analyse an issue, identify potential solutions and test them in practice. Our ultimate objective is to implement “quality by design”, enabling our teams to get things right first time, rather than correcting errors after the fact.
Even the most specific and detailed SOPs will fall short if there is no organisation-wide awareness of, and commitment to, quality and continuous improvement. That is why building and maintaining a genuine culture of quality is so critically important – and why, at TLScontact, it remains at the heart of how we manage our services on behalf of our government clients.
Article written by
Cyril Khamphanh, Operations Support Lead